Her safe haven. As a child, Eliza had been scooped into her grandmother’s sturdy high wooden bed with its lavender-smelling sheets, whenever she’d appeared, trembling from a nightmare.

It had taken three removal men – sweating and irritable – to get it up the stairs to her apartment after her mother had swept through the house where she’d grown up, like a hurricane on a mission. Eliza had been distraught, snatching delicate crockery and the reassuring shape of a fat-bellied stone vase out of her mother’s path.

She’d had to fight for the bed – you can get a perfectly good one at Ikea, you know – and the cosy winged armchair that felt so good now by her fireplace.

Throughout the jagged landscape of her thirties this bed had given her comfort from the nightmares she now lived instead of dreamt. However harrowing the stories in the family court, she would enter her bedroom and lie down on these sheets – still smelling of lavender – and feel safe.

But had it become too safe?

Life had been tough but kind of predictable. The law degree, the junior clerkship, working her way up the system, fighting the politics and the preconceptions.

Knowing that some people couldn’t see past her shortened arm. Obsessed with seeing how she’d pick up her bag or open a folder. Speaking differently to her as though her brain might have been lost in that same flip of the genetic coin.

In some ways it had helped – at least the old judges always remembered her. It was a way of standing out in the crowd of eager young legal workers in their identical dark suits and combed back hair. Some days she liked being different and some days she was just so exhausted by it.

She yearned for a more expanded life.

Her ever scathing mother had been shocked when she’d announced her pregnancy.

“Oh dear, do you want me to come with you?” her forceful practicality assuming the most efficient solution to Eliza’s predicament. She couldn’t believe that her well-educated daughter had chosen this fallen path. The term conscious single mother bounced off her unprocessed.

“Who’s done this to you?” her father had growled, making empty threats – he who had never hit anyone in his life.

Once she’d started to show, there were the well-intentioned questions from colleagues about how she would cope – and guarded questions regarding the likelihood of inherited limb difference.  

She heard the scuffle of Tara’s feet on the floorboards in the room next door.

“Mama, mama, nasty dream!” she panted as she rushed in. “Up you come darling,” Eliza scooped her daughter into the bed. “You’re safe now.”