Motherhood, infertility, and maternal loss

Motherhood, infertility, and maternal loss form a painful counterpoint among Rachel Watson, Megan Hipwell, and Anna Watson. Rachel’s inability to conceive makes motherhood an imagined future she grieves without ever having possessed; Megan’s hidden history reveals that she became a mother and lost her infant daughter; Anna’s care of Evie places everyday childcare beside the fear and moral judgment attached to women’s fitness as mothers. Together, these strands show how longing, loss, and caregiving shape the women’s relationships and how a private bereavement can become a public accusation.

Infertility and imagined motherhood

Rachel’s desire for a child is concrete and sustained. While sitting in a small park after a police interview, she imagines the life she once expected: bringing her own baby there, choosing a buggy, shopping for clothes and educational toys, and holding a child on her lap. The present setting sharpens the distance between that vision and her actual circumstances: she is alone on a bench between interviews, watching other adults supervise children. The park preserves the shape of the life she wanted while making its absence newly visible.

Rachel has no medical explanation for why she could not become pregnant. She and Tom Watson tried one round of IVF, which was unsuccessful and, in Rachel’s account, contributed to the breakdown of their marriage. Their grief was not equal in form. Tom wanted to be a father, but believed they could still be happy without children; Rachel describes motherhood as something she needed and says he did not understand how a person could mourn what she had never had. That mismatch left her feeling isolated within the marriage as well as among friends and colleagues whose pregnancies and children made the subject difficult to escape.

The social pressure compounds the private loss. Rachel recalls being asked when it would be her turn and having the couple’s attempts to conceive treated as acceptable conversation at family lunches. She came to feel that the failure was assigned to her, even though the difficulty had been approached as a shared problem. Later, Tom’s quick conception of a child with Anna deepens Rachel’s sense of personal failure. Her account connects infertility not only to the absence of a child but also to humiliation, loneliness, and a narrowing sense of her own worth.

Caregiving and the distance between longing and experience

The novel contrasts Rachel’s imagined motherhood with her actual experience of looking after Evie. Rachel goes to Anna’s home to help with the baby, but the work does not awaken the maternal desire Tom expects it to. Instead, Rachel describes leaving the house eager to shower and remove the baby’s smell. She misses the adult life she associates with her former work at a gallery and feels like an extra presence while Anna’s attention remains fixed on the child’s feeding, warmth, and routine. The contrast resists a simple equation between longing for a child and finding infant care fulfilling.

Anna’s perspective on that help is shaped by vigilance. She worries about leaving Evie with Megan and later recalls Megan holding, feeding, changing, and playing with the baby while Anna rested. Once allegations about Megan’s past emerge, those ordinary acts of care acquire a threatening retrospective meaning for Anna. Her fear is not evidence that Megan harmed Evie; it shows how the disclosure of a hidden maternal history changes Anna’s interpretation of someone she had allowed into her home.

Anna also remembers Megan as seeming detached from the experience of holding a child and happy to return Evie to her. That impression sits uneasily beside Megan’s own account of her daughter as a good, much-loved baby. The difference matters: Anna is interpreting Megan from the outside, while Megan’s memories disclose attachment that was concealed from nearly everyone around her. The novel therefore separates how a woman appears to perform care from what she has experienced or felt as a mother.

Megan’s concealed motherhood

Megan tells Kamal Abdic that she became pregnant and realized too late that she would not end the pregnancy. She had the baby at home, with help from a woman connected to Mac who had nursing experience. Megan remembers her daughter as very small, with dark eyes and blonde hair, and recalls that she slept well and did not cry much. She named her Elizabeth (Libby). Speaking the child’s name aloud after keeping the history private gives the disclosure a personal specificity that the label of an alleged crime cannot convey.

Megan’s account also preserves the difficult circumstances around the birth. She had not attended scans, was smoking and drinking, and avoided facing the pregnancy. She describes the child as unwanted by both parents, yet remembers her affectionately and says that caring for her was not as hard as she had expected. These facts coexist rather than cancel each other: the pregnancy was not planned or welcomed, but Megan’s recollection includes tenderness and a sense of the baby’s particular character.

Libby died when she was only a few months old. After an argument with Mac, who left the home for a period, Megan was exhausted and drinking while trying to keep warm in a cold house. She took the baby into the bath with her, fell asleep, and Libby drowned. Megan’s account places the death within a specific moment of isolation and fatigue, without making the surrounding circumstances an excuse. The loss remained unspoken for years, and Megan’s decision to tell Kamal is also a decision to let another person know what happened.

Disclosure, grief, and public judgment

Megan’s telling is presented as a difficult return to an event she has not been able to speak about. She says she needs to reach the end of the story and tell someone before the unspoken memory consumes her. When she describes Libby’s death, Kamal listens without withdrawing from her. Megan experiences his response as safety and relief: the disclosure has not made him regard her as a monster. The scene makes witnessing part of the theme, because the first listener to receive her account does not reduce her to the worst thing that happened.

After Megan’s disappearance and death, a newspaper report claims that she may have been involved in the unlawful killing of her own child and speculates that this might explain her murder. The report is attributed vaguely to sources close to the investigation; the police do not confirm the allegation in the cited account. Anna nevertheless reacts to the story through her own fear and anger, reconsidering the times Megan cared for Evie. The gap between an unverified public allegation and the private history of Libby’s death is central: the rumor turns a complex, concealed bereavement into a possible motive and invites judgment before the circumstances are fully understood.

Pregnancy, paternity, and unequal grief

The discovery that Megan was pregnant at the time of her death extends the theme from motherhood already lost to a child who never lived. Detective Sergeant Riley tells Scott Hipwell about the pregnancy, news he says he had longed to hear. He believes the baby was his, although he acknowledges that no DNA test established paternity. His certainty reveals the emotional force of the possibility, not scientific confirmation. Rachel recognizes that the pregnancy could give more than one man a possible motive, but Scott’s visible distress makes her accept his grief as genuine.

For Scott, the news opens an imagined future at the moment it confirms that future is gone. His response contrasts with Rachel’s earlier loss: she mourned a child she could not conceive, while Scott mourns a pregnancy he believed might have become his child. Megan’s prior motherhood, meanwhile, had been hidden from him and from the wider community. The novel places these forms of loss beside one another without treating them as interchangeable.

Narrative significance

The theme develops through withheld knowledge and belated disclosure. Rachel’s infertility is explained through retrospective reflection, while Megan’s motherhood emerges when she finally tells Kamal about Libby. Later revelations about Megan’s pregnancy change Scott’s understanding of her death and expose the limits of what others know about her. Information about motherhood arrives in stages, repeatedly revising earlier judgments of the women and of their relationships with children.

Across these stories, motherhood is neither a single desire nor a reliable measure of character. Rachel can long intensely for a child yet feel alienated while providing childcare; Megan can have entered motherhood unprepared and under difficult circumstances while remembering her daughter with love; Anna can be devoted to Evie and still interpret another woman’s caregiving through suspicion and fear. The theme’s force lies in this refusal of easy verdicts: longing, practical care, maternal attachment, and loss do not align neatly, and the women’s private experiences are repeatedly exposed to other people’s expectations and interpretations.