‘I feel terrible, actually.’ She spoke quietly, subconsciously rubbing the base of her back with the tips of her fingers. ‘I just— I don’t know. End of the year, probably.’

There was a moment’s pause and then Madeleine made a sound of acknowledgement. ‘Oh my God, you’re pregnant.’

‘Piss off,’ she said, taking a drag of her cigarette.

When she looked up, Madeleine was staring at her, an indecipherable expression moving across her face. ‘You’re pregnant.’ She said it again, this time without inflection, and instantly the pain in Gabriela’s head spread to her stomach.

‘Of course I’m not pregnant,’ she said, the words settling over her with a chill. Except, on the odd occasion when they had had sex recently, they hadn’t exactly been careful.

‘Hey, mind if I join you?’ It was Serena, her face crooked with a smile as she wove her legs under the table next to Madeleine, stifling a hiccup.

‘Oh my God, sorry, I’ve got hiccups! What are we talking about?’ Serena said, too drunk to notice the loaded silence that had settled as Gabriela processed the dawning realisation she’d been suppressing over the past days, holding its head under water, ignoring the bubbles floating to the surface.

‘Is she telling you about Hanoi? Urgh, I’m so fucking jealous. When are you leaving?’

Serena stopped then, finally aware of her own babbling, her eyes widening with an awkward recognition as the silence stretched out between us, even louder now.

‘Hanoi?’ Gabriela said, her voice quiet. ‘You’re going to Vietnam?’

Madeleine sniffed, taking a drag of her cigarette, and spoke more brightly than her expression suggested. ‘I was about to tell you. The human trafficking work I started in Krakow … There’s a sort of link-up with a new agency in Hanoi, part of an effort against modern slavery; they wanted someone to head up a team and – I go in January.’

‘Shit,’ Gabriela replied, her face breaking into a smile, tears forming at the corners of her eyes for reasons she couldn’t fully fathom. ‘That’s amazing, Mads.’

Madeleine smiled back at her.

‘It’s what I wanted. I’ll miss you.’

‘I know,’ Gabriela said, trying to keep her expression bright, suppressing the scream rising through her body. ‘I’ll miss you, too.’

‘Hey, Gabs,’ Madeleine asked a couple of days later, as Gabriela gathered her things at the end of the day, her mind distracted by the result of the pregnancy test she’d taken the previous day. ‘You know what you started saying at the pub … About you know who.’

Madeleine glanced quickly around the office. Satisfied no one else could hear, she continued, ‘What were you going to say?’