‘Seriously?’ Alice snapped, as though both she and the final threads of this friendship were close to breaking point. Her eyes searched Nina’s.

‘I fell pregnant too,’ Nina whispered. ‘When you… when you all went back to London after your wedding and I stayed in Paris, I found out I was pregnant. And I couldn’t tell anyone.’

‘What?’ Jules said.

‘What happened?’ Alice asked.

‘I had an abortion,’ Nina said. ‘My cousin Erin came with me. And…’ It was coming out in a rush now, there was no stopping it. ‘I was pregnant again, that last weekend in Paris.’

Jules’s eyes widened with shock, then she exclaimed, ‘I knew it! You weren’t drinking!’

Nina nodded. ‘And I had another abortion,’ she said, her voice cracking, ‘and that’s also why I didn’t get in touch. I didn’t want to break your heart, Jules, I didn’t want you to know…’

‘And you couldn’t tell me, because of what had happened with Ted…’ Alice concluded correctly.

‘Yeah,’ Nina mumbled. ‘I only found out the night before we left and I spent the weekend in a tailspin, trying to decide what to do, but when I woke up that Sunday morning – after we’d had that brilliant night out – well, we thought it was brilliant,’ she said to Jules with a weak smile, ‘we didn’t know what you were going through… I woke up and I was bleeding. I panicked. In that moment I thought, I want this baby.’ She bit her lip. ‘So I went straight to London and Flynn took me for a scan and when everything looked okay, it felt like a sign.’

‘But you changed your mind?’ Alice asked gently. She added as an afterthought, ‘And that’s why you left without telling me.’ She pieced the events of that Sunday morning back together.

‘I don’t think my mind ever changed. I always knew I didn’t want to have children. I got swept up in that weekend, being in Paris and thinking of the future. I knew I couldn’t give that baby everything it deserved. And you know, honestly, I think there’s enough people on the planet. No offence!’ She grimaced at Alice.

‘None taken,’ Alice said. She’d been thinking about how it must’ve been for Nina, pregnant at the same time as her, in love with the same man. She was thinking how it would have been for Nina as Charlotte had grown older. It was Ted she was angry with, not Nina.

‘It’s a fair point,’ Jules said, storing it mentally to mull over later. Jules had a long way to go but through her sessions with Cindy she was starting to imagine a time when she might come to terms with not having children of her own, might be able to imagine herself living a full life, nonetheless.

‘You loved him first,’ Alice said. She tipped her head to the side as she processed this and Nina nodded, squeezing her fingers over Alice’s warm hand.

‘He didn’t deserve either of you,’ Jules said. She’d love to give Ted Astor a piece of her mind. And a good hard slap.