She told us on the most beautiful day. It was the start of spring, when the sun was chasing away the cold, and the smell of cut grass was in the air. It was a strange kind of irony, that this could be happening to her when there was such beautiful, new life forming outside.

“I lost the baby”, she told us while warming her hands on her cup as if this would stop us seeing the bruises, and with those words we lost a part of ourselves to. I was going to be an aunt, the best aunt, Terry was going to be an uncle, and mum was going to be be a grandmother for what would probably be the only time.

When the hospital discharged her, she came home promising she wouldn’t go back to him, yet with her came the wailing, which was replaced by quiet sobs, and then an all encompassing silence that only grief brings.

Days later, while we sat in the newly blooming garden escaping the suffocating stillness of the house, she told me how she felt when she’d gotten pregnant and that she’d wished for death, of her and the baby, so afraid of his reaction. “But now”, she whispered knowing she’d never carry again, “all I wish for is life”.