Shall I tell you what happened? Why I’d grown resentful? 

I’m the last branch on the family tree, the final leaf in autumn. 

And so, within the mists of a reddened Hallow’s Eve (which only served to make me  grieve), I grew resentful. Fate had hung over my baby’s crib like a mobile, but the crib stood  empty because my baby’s death had happened offstage. 

(Instage?) 

A vesper bell never tolled to remind me that my babe was gone, so I grew resentful, like  an empty house, or rather, an empty womb. 

As if things couldn’t get worse, I’d developed the Big Malignancy. An irregular pain in  my breast; a pinch and a punch for the first of the month, eh? 

So, two things in the space of a week. Were they related, or was it coincidence? A shadow  had fallen on me like winter. 

I was able to smile, though, when the doctor reassured me the twist inside my breast  wasn’t cancer. But that smile was just a lid to cork my screams.

So, the next day, after rallying (somewhat), I rose from a bed that seemed more like an  open grave, and tried another healer. 

‘Come in, dear,’ Sally said with a strange grimace. I’d found her online, on the National  Federation of Spiritual Healers’ website. 

Her lounge — a seventies miscarriage itself — carried a tide mark of curios and trinkets  along a dado rail that looked like the scum from a bath, or high tide; twisted wooden  poppets, tumbled glass, eyeless gulls… 

‘This is a mistake,’ I’d said, backing away, but she tilted her head with such heartbreaking  sympathy, such empathic indulgence in her eyes. I stayed. 

‘I suppose you want me to help him move into the light?’ she said. 

‘Him, who?’

She pointed to my breast.