“Any books for cranky babies?”

I look up from the box of books I’d been unpacking and find Elle standing in front of me. She looks so much better than she did a few weeks ago, pink cheeked from the cold and less drawn thanks to the fact Charlotte has started to sleep for longer stretches. I peep inside the pram at the bundled-up baby, positively angelic as she naps.

“I won’t hear a word said against her,” I say. I’ve spent as much time as I can with them lately, anxious to make up for the time I missed. Elle and I are mostly over the blip in our relationship, we need each other too much to let it linger. We had a couple of glasses of wine last weekend and sniveled together over a movie, and I found the words to tell her how sorry I was for not being there when she needed me.

“Mum thought I had postnatal depression,” she says. “But I knew it wasn’t that. I was just so bloody furious with you for leaving me and too knackered to be able to talk myself out of it.”

It’s only now that I understand how much my absence hurt her, Mum too.

“I wondered if you’d be able to watch her for half an hour or so?” Elle says. “It’s David’s birthday next week, I’d kill kittens for the chance to walk around the shops without this pushchair.”

“Right now?” I say, smiling, because she’s just turned my day from humdrum to the best kind. This is the first time she’s asked me to watch Charlotte.

“Unless you’re too busy?”

I shake my head. “No. Perfect timing, I’m due for my lunchbreak.”

Elle rattles off a whole bunch of instructions about nappy cream and bottles in case Charlotte won’t stop crying, and I try to listen but all I can think is how glad I am that Elle trusts me again and wonder if it’s possible to pick a sleeping baby up without waking them because I’m bursting out of my skin for a cuddle of this child.

And then it’s just us, Charlotte and me. I wheel her slowly up and down the aisles of the library, absently talking her through the nonfiction sections, heading slowly toward the children’s corner. When I pull back the blanket and peer into the pram, Charlotte gazes right back at me, her wide-awake eyes fringed with dark lashes.

“Hello you,” I smile, unearthing her from her pram. She’s still doll-tiny, delicate even in her snowsuit, and she fixes her solemn, Elle-like eyes on me as I settle us into one of the new armchairs.

“You know me,” I remind her. “I was the first human you saw.”

I like to think she remembers, that she’s content in my arms because she recognizes me as safe harbor.

“What do we do now?” I whisper, even though there’s no one in this part of the library for us to interrupt. “Shall I read to you?”

It feels like the appropriate thing to do given our surroundings, so I pick out a book I know well from my own childhood.

“It’s a story about a caterpillar,” I say, balancing the open book on my knees. “He’s a pretty greedy guy, from what I remember.”

I move her more securely into the fold of my elbow, and she watches me intently as I tell her how the caterpillar hatched on Sunday, ate an apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, and three plums on Wednesday. I swear she’s taking it in. I tell her how he eats so much cheese and chocolate cake and salami that he feels ill, but then it’s Sunday and he starts all over again until he’s neither hungry nor little anymore.

I close the book and put it back on the stand, even though the story isn’t over yet. Everyone knows how it ends.

“And then, Charlotte, the caterpillar spins himself a cocoon and he goes to sleep,” I say. “And while he’s sleeping he dreams of all the wonderful things he’s going to see, the magical life he’s going to live, and all the far-flung places he’s going to go.”

I stroke her palm, and her hand closes around mine, a flower closing its petals, just as she did the morning she was born. Already her fingers are longer, less translucent, her grip more firm.

“And after a while he’s had enough of sleeping,” I tell her. “So he wakes up and stretches his new wings to test them out, and then he flies away in search of new adventures.”

And that’s when this small, precious child smiles at me. She’s already been doing it for a few weeks for Elle and Mum, but she’s made me work for it—the price of leaving her in the lurch, I guess. I smile back, and then I laugh, and she just keeps giving me that ridiculous beam that’s split her face wide open like a small tree frog’s.

“You’re really something, you know,” I tell her, my throat tight. “Thank you for being here.”

And I am thankful. Maybe her impact would have lessened had I not been there to help her come into the world, if she hadn’t gasped her first breath in my hands. But she did, and in doing so, she laid her tiny palms against the edge of my sleeping world and pushed it just far enough away to make my journey there perilous.

As she grows I’m going to be on hand to help her learn colors and take her to the movies and warn her off the wrong boys, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to teach this little girl more than she’s taught me just by being here.

“My little butterfly,” I say.