Emily quietly asked everyone to leave. It took forty minutes to get fifty guests out of the garden. I went from table to table, offering explanations that weren’t true because I didn’t know what else to say. Once the last person had gone, I returned inside and Emily finally explained the hospital bracelet. Priya was a midwife working at a maternity unit approximately three hours away. The bracelet wasn’t old or misplaced. It had been printed eleven days earlier at a hospital admissions desk, with Emily standing beside Priya. Five weeks earlier, on October second, Emily had attended her twenty-week scan. The doctors had discovered that her baby had congenital diaphragmatic hernia.

The condition meant that the baby’s diaphragm hadn’t closed properly, allowing organs that should have remained below it to move into the chest. This left the lungs without enough room to develop normally. It was serious, but not necessarily hopeless. With specialized surgery shortly after birth, some babies survived and recovered. Emily’s consultant had given her a survival estimate slightly better than one in two. The date printed on the bracelet was her scheduled admission at a specialist fetal medicine unit, three hours away. The procedure was planned for twenty-six weeks of pregnancy. That date was tomorrow. My daughter had known about the diagnosis for five weeks without telling me.