The morning passed in a blur. She had no idea whether her work had been abysmal or brilliant. She had chatted and listened and induced trances and written out receipts while an amazed voice in the back of her head chanted over and over: I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant, I’m actually pregnant.

It was much too soon. Only three months! Their relationship was far too new for the words “I’m pregnant.” It felt tasteless and tacky. Like something that happened to a teenage couple on a soapie.

Also, it was too medical. My period is late as a result of your sperm accidentally colliding with my egg through something faulty or slippery or otherwise relating to our condom usage, and I did a test that confirmed the level of pregnancy hormones in my urine and there you have it.

Putting that aside, did Patrick even want another child? At all? Ever? She thought he did, but now that she considered it, she saw that her beliefs were based on flimsy evidence, such as the fact that he adored his son, and she’d once seen him smile tenderly at a stranger’s baby, and his mother wanted him to have more children and he seemed very fond of his mother. Also, he was a lovely man, and lovely men should automatically want more babies because it was a biological imperative that they pass on the loveliness gene.

In fact, it was quite possible he’d smiled at that stranger’s baby because he was thinking, Thank God that’s all behind me.

She felt a cold chill at the thought. It was ridiculous. She knew so much about him—he was frightened of spiders, he couldn’t see the point of cucumber, he’d once punched a boy called Bruno—but she didn’t know this one essential point.

And let’s assume he did want another child, what would they actually, literally do?

Would they move in together? Into her house or his? Get married? She didn’t want to live in his house. The bath was too shallow and the kitchen too small and the color of the living room carpet was bad for her soul. She loved her grandparents’ house and working in this room and falling asleep to the sound of the sea. But maybe it would be disruptive to Jack to move him out of his home? And what about Jack? Was he ready to have a little brother or sister?

A little brother or sister. That gave her another fresh start. The baby was either a boy or a girl. That was already decided. Oh my goodness, she was having a baby. She suddenly felt weak with a strange feeling that she thought might be equal parts hysterical terror and blinding joy. A baby.

“Ellen? Could we get started?”

It was her two o’clock. Luisa. She had just returned from using Ellen’s bathroom and was looking at her with a faintly angry expression on her attractive, sculpted face. Ellen had always sensed an undercurrent of barely controlled fury in Luisa. She was a relatively new patient, a daughter of a friend of Julia’s mother. She was seeing Ellen for “unexplained infertility,” and she had made it quite clear that although she didn’t actually believe in “this sort of mind control stuff,” she had got to a point where she was willing to try anything. She said she was also seeing an acupuncturist, an herbalist and a dietitian. Imagine if Luisa knew that Ellen had accidentally, clumsily, foolishly, inconveniently become pregnant. The world was an extremely unfair place.

I was in my late thirties when I met Patrick, so I knew if I was ever going to have a baby he was my only chance. It wasn’t like I had to beg him or anything. He said yes straightaway. He even seemed excited by the idea—he kept talking about how he didn’t want Jack to be an only child—but then, as the months went by without anything happening, he seemed to lose interest.

He didn’t want to talk about it and he refused to see any doctors. He didn’t even want to try on the right days. He said, “I don’t want to hear that you’re ovulating.” As if ovulating was something disgusting.

In all honesty, he was a bit of a bastard about it.

I forgave him. I understood that it was different for men. They don’t have the biological drive.

He said, “Saskia, my love, if it’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be.”

Which was true. We had Jack.

Except that it wasn’t true. He had Jack. I didn’t have Jack at all. And I wasn’t his love.

Turned out that it was meant to be. He was meant to have another baby, just not with me.

“Sorry? What did you say? You’re inviting me to a Tupperware party?” Ellen was on the phone to Danny, the young hypnotherapist she’d been mentoring over the past year.

“Ha! Yeah, right!” shouted Danny. He appeared to be calling from a nightclub. He reminded Ellen of Patrick’s younger brother, Simon. That generation seemed to have a different dialect or accent or something. They all sounded ever so slightly American, and there was an amused casualness about the way they saw the world, as if nothing was beyond them. Maybe it was technology. It put power in their fingertips.

Or was that the way Ellen had sounded when she was twenty-four too? No. She’d never been casual about anything.

“Let me just go outside for a moment,” said Danny.

I’m pregnant, Danny. Pregnant. That means I’m having a baby. And I’ve only been dating the guy for three months. What would you do if your girlfriend told you she was pregnant after only three months?

“OK, is that better?” The background noise had vanished. “No, what I’m saying is, you know how you’ve got Tupperware parties, right? So I was just standing at the bar and listening to these two women, middle-aged—mothers, I guess—and they were talking about how much weight they needed to lose, and their personal trainers, and how long you need to run on the treadmill to work off a roast potato, and you could tell they were, like, passionate about this shit.”