Heart frame with feet and flowers

It was the week of the big snow, and Sister Amy Probert had the night shift with two midwives and a porter called Dennis who could not walk past a cup of tea without stopping. At ten past three a girl came in from the car park, soaked through, holding her belly as if it might leave her. The baby came small, five pounds of him, pink as a cough sweet, and went straight across the corridor to the special care cot with a tag on his wrist.

Before he went, the midwife asked the mother if she wanted his feet done. Amy had a blue stamp pad in her drawer, and she pressed each tiny sole onto a card with the care you'd use on a letter to somebody you loved. The mother cried over the first print, then laughed, then asked for a second card in case the first one smudged.

Nobody thought about those cards again until the spring, when a woman came up to the desk with a folded paper in her coat pocket and asked whether Amy still worked nights. She had the prints framed in a heart, she said, with teal flowers the girl had asked for, the same teal as the lino on Seven. A man in a shop by the docks had drawn it all out in ink for her, feet and heart and leaves, so the card would never smudge again. Amy took the paper, held it under the strip light, and said nothing for a long while. Dennis, for once, didn't offer tea.