I buried my daughter that week. Marguerite was gone by the afternoon and the doctors had done everything, and I was walking past the café she loved because I did not know where else to put myself. That was where I saw the pregnant young woman and the boy of about seven. She asked me to buy him the cheapest thing they had and said she wanted no money, only that he had not eaten since the day before. I ordered him soup and grilled cheese and milk, and got her a hot meal and two sandwiches for later, and she cried and held my hand and said nobody had ever been kind to them. I told her to wait while I ran to the shop for a few things, and when I came back they had gone.

At four the next morning something woke me and my whole yard was full of cribs and bassinets, from the porch out to the pavement, and nobody was there. In the first one sat a box marked with a number one, and inside it were my daughter’s baby clothes, folded, and the hospital bracelet from the day Marguerite was born, and a photograph I had lost eleven years ago.

The young woman was Odile. Marguerite had been her caseworker for two years. My daughter had kept a box of things for her at the office, and had been quietly paying for Odile’s antenatal care out of her own salary, and had never told me any of it.

Odile had learned about the death that morning from the clinic. She had not known who I was at the café. She recognised me afterward from a photograph on Marguerite’s desk. Every crib in that yard came from twenty-six women my daughter had worked with, brought overnight, because they had nothing else to give and wanted me to see what she had been.

I keep four of them. The rest went where they were needed.

Odile’s daughter is nine now. She is called Marguerite. She sleeps in the crib marked number one, or she did, until she outgrew it and started climbing on it instead.

I thought I had lost the only proof my daughter existed. She left it in the hands of the people she saw when nobody else did, and they carried it back to me in the dark.