Inside the paper was his grandfather’s watch. Not valuable in the way strangers assume, a steel Longines from 1962, but Bennett had asked for it every year since he was eleven and Rosalind had always said he would get it when he had earned it. She held it flat in her palm and named her condition. Six months. He would do every night feed, every nappy through the night, and one full day alone with Wren each week while I left the house and went wherever I liked. If he managed the six months without complaint, the watch was his. If he did not, it went to his cousin in Málaga.

He agreed in about two seconds, which told me everything about what that watch meant and everything about what the previous seven months had meant.

The first three weeks were bad. He was exhausted and irritable and twice he tried to negotiate. Rosalind stayed eleven weeks and refused, every time, without raising her voice once. Somewhere around the second month something shifted, and I came home from a Saturday out to find him on the floor with Wren and a plastic bowl of pasta, narrating a story about a duck, entirely unaware anyone was in the doorway.

The recliner went in the fourth month. He sold it himself, without being asked, and bought the high chair, a cot mattress that did not sag, and a second-hand pushchair with decent brakes.

He wears the watch. He earned it and he knows exactly how narrowly.

We are not fixed by a watch. We did nine months of counselling and there are things about that year I have not entirely put down. But he asks now, before he decides what we can afford, and he has never once said he is the only one earning.

Wren is four. She calls Rosalind Abuela and they video call on Sundays.

I spent seven months being told what my work was worth by a man who had never done any of it. His mother did not lecture him. She simply made him stand in my place for half a year, and he could not unsee it, and neither could I.