‘This is your scan; you decide who to have by your side,’ she said, returning to her computer to tap something in. ‘Anyway, don’t they say that the best people in your life are the family you’d choose for yourself?’

‘Jensen, your granddad used to say something like that,’ Betsy said. ‘He said family are the ones who show up when you need them most.’

‘Like his volunteers at Butterworth Wines,’ Jensen said.

‘And you, Lottie. You showed up just when we needed you.’ Betsy took a packet of mints out of her handbag and offered them round before settling back on the visitor’s chair as close to the screen as she could get. ‘And now we’re returning the favour. Right, when does the film start?’

‘Behave, Gran,’ Jensen warned.

‘Oh shush, this is the most fun I’ve had in ages.’

‘Ready?’ Dulce held a tube over my stomach.

I nodded and then gasped as she squirted some cold gel on to my naked stomach.

‘Imagine if it’s twins,’ Betsy said, rustling the wrapper, blithely unaware of just how many times that particular image had visited me under the shadow of darkness.

‘Imagine,’ I said with a faint shudder.

I’d considered almost every eventuality from it being conceived over Christmas when Harvey and I had spent most of the holiday in bed, and therefore due any day, to triplets made during our last week together in June, to being a boy in the absolute image of its father. None of those scenarios filled me with joy.

Dulce picked up a small device connected to her computer and showed it to me. ‘This is a probe. See this end? It’s got a sensor on it which picks up sound waves when I press …’ She rolled it firmly across the lower part of my stomach. ‘Here.’

‘Whoever decided scans should be done on a full bladder must have been a sadist,’ I said, gasping.

Dulce chuckled. ‘Sorry. We need the bladder full to push the uterus up to get a good view of—’

‘A baby!’ Jensen almost collapsed on top of me in his excitement. ‘It’s a baby!’

‘Oh my goodness!’ I exclaimed. ‘So it is!’

There on the screen, unmistakably, was a baby. And as Dulce rolled the probe backwards and forwards and up and down, various parts of it came into view: a disproportionally big head, an oval-shaped body, even the faint lines of its ribs. My baby. I couldn’t drag my eyes from the screen. It was all suddenly and overwhelmingly real.

‘Can you tell if everything’s okay?’ I asked in a whisper, hardly daring to breathe in case the picture vanished.

‘Here you are, dear.’ Betsy pressed a tissue into my hand; I hadn’t even realized I was crying. She was too; even Jensen had gone a bit misty-eyed.