I had eighteen dollars and no childcare, so I took my eight-month-old to work — and at ten past five the blanket in the linen store was empty.

Mrs Veck rang me at twenty past six in the morning.

She is seventy-one and she has had Fern three days a week since the June and she is the reason I have a job at all.

And she sounded frightened, which I had never heard from her, and she said her doctor had told her to rest and that she did not think she could safely have the baby that day.

I rang four people in forty minutes.

One did not answer. One wanted two hundred dollars for an afternoon. One could do next Tuesday.

And I sat on the edge of my bed with Fern on my knee for about an hour trying to invent a fifth option.

There wasn’t one.