I write in praise of the junior doctor who, at four am or some time thereabouts, pale, sweating, swaying foot to foot at the tale-end of a double shift, put his fingers into my uterus and swept the last blood-thickened scraps into a metal dish, what was left of the placenta that hours previously held the faulty but still beating heart of the fourteen week fetus that was never going to, was never meant to make it. He did this because I asked him to, begged, pleaded with him to be spared the mask, the plummet, the counting back into the abyss, anesthetic, the D and C procedure that recalled that other time, that other loss, the one I had chosen. He did this because he could, because in the lemon-walled room with the Peter Rabbit curtains at four in the morning there was just me and him and the small break the baby made in the fabric of things as it slipped away. There he was – younger than me, too young maybe to have suffered much personal loss – pale, sweating, swaying foot to foot, dark blond hair, baby-face, hands deft, making this pact I now break; somehow by chance or fate assigned to me that night when he should have been in bed dreaming, his school jumper rolled for a goal post, tendons primed, arms out-stretched, fingers splayed for the ball as it was kicked his way.