There are babies who arrive quietly into a room, and there are babies who arrive. Yayara was very much the second kind.

Eight weeks old, wrapped in pieces from my own baby wardrobe, each outfit somehow more hers than the last. A repertoire of expressions that belonged on someone considerably older and wiser: the side glance, the slow smirk, the single raised brow.

Mum and Dad laughed their way through it all, already well-versed in the particular diplomacy of early parenthood.

She led. We followed. That's simply how it went.