The woman sat on the corner of the bed in the dark watching the child sleep. She adjusted the angle of the door so that enough light came in from the landing without the beam falling across his face. When her back ached from the angle of her watching she turned and looked out of the window at the moonlight glistening on the roofs but she could still hear his snuffling breath and she could smell his warm, damp skin. A cat knocked over a milk bottle on the street. She held her breath as the clatter died away. The baby slept on.

She thought of the other nights alone in this room, the moonlight and the street lamps throwing strange shadows on to the ceiling. Once she had lain awake on her back staring for hours at the silhouette of a dog that seemed to her more and more real as the night wore on.

The child whimpered and she was immediately alert, tense, watching, back in the present. He turned his head and sucked on an imaginary bottle and then suddenly his eyes were wide open, staring into hers. Their gaze locked for some moments and neither of them breathed. His eyes held hers and he seemed wise and knowing as if he sensed her need for him. Then he let out one long, anguished bawl. He was very hot, sweat gathering in the folds of skin around his neck and wrists. She lifted him from the cot and tried to enfold him but he was stiff with fright and anger and twisted his head, trying to see around the door into the light.

She wrestled with him for an hour. Walked and crooned to him. Her limbs ached from holding him.

Finally she felt his small body relax. His tiny hand had crept through the open neck of her nightdress and rested on her breast. She rocked him gently, humming under her breath so that he could feel the vibration of it in her body but hear no sound. She gave herself up to the moment, to the night, to the feel of his skin on her skin. Warmth spread from the tiny hand, through her whole body, lifting the hair from her scalp, tingling along the nerve ends just beneath the skin of her arms. For one brief moment, that would never leave her, she let herself believe that he was hers. Her thoughts went out to all the other mothers rocking their babies through the night. She became one with them, joined in Motherhood.

Tomorrow she would return him whole, and safe, to his mother’s arms. She would take the praise for the quality of her care, her selflessness. She would let them heap thanks on her for her sacrifice of time. They would never know, because she could not explain, what she had stolen from them that night.