5:30 am. Again.

5:30 am. The room is grey. The baby is, miraculously, still asleep. There is a damp patch on the sheet under her ribs. There is also a damp patch on the front of her T-shirt, which she discovers when she sits up and the cold cotton meets her skin.

She looks at the towel on the floor — the system, she calls it — and considers, very seriously, going back to sleep on it for one more hour.

She does not go back to sleep. The baby would wake. The day would start anyway. She takes off the shirt. She peels off the nursing pad that has rolled up into something that looks, and feels, like a small sodden disc. She drops it in the bin. She puts on a clean T-shirt.

By 7 am, the new T-shirt is also wet.

She does not cry. She has been crying about smaller things this week, and this one, somehow, is not making the list.

A friend texts. Coffee? Tomorrow? She types yes. She deletes yes. She types no, sorry, the baby. She presses send.

She is starting to notice. She is starting to wonder if this is who she is now.

She does not say this to her partner. She does not say it.

An Instagram ad. She does not know how the algorithm found her. She does not care. The ad is grainy and quiet. It says: Three months. No towel.

She clicks. She reads. The brand is Vemorina — Belgian, she thinks, and confirms. There is a founder story she reads twice. A couple, Jurgen and Alejandra, who built a nursing bra because a close friend had told them about the 3 am wakes and the towel and the cancelled coffees. Jurgen's own mother had quietly confirmed she'd done the same forty years earlier.

The bra has four layers. The inside is OEKO-TEX Class I certified. The absorbent core is internally tested to hold 30 ml per cup. The brand does not promise her the world.

It says: for the leak between feeds. Swap on heavy days.

She appreciates the not-promising. She orders two. The website says they will arrive in 48 hours.

A package. From Belgium. She opens it standing up in the kitchen. The bra is in tissue, in a box that does not feel like a box from a fast-fashion warehouse. The fabric is soft. She tries one on. She wears it under a grey shirt.

She nurses the baby at 11 am. She nurses the baby at 1 pm. By 4 pm she realises she has not checked her shirt once.

That night, the baby wakes at 3. She feeds. She lies back. She runs a hand across her chest and the cotton is dry. She does not understand it at first. Then she does.

She sleeps.

A friend's birthday dinner. Her first proper night out. She does not bring a change of T-shirt. She does not bring an extra muslin. She does not check her phone for the time every twenty minutes.

She drinks one glass of wine. She laughs at something her friend says. She gets home at 11 pm. She gets to the front door before she realises she has not thought about her chest once all evening.

The towel is gone from the bedroom floor. She does not remember putting it away. She thinks about this for a moment, then forgets.