‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch what you said there,’ I say.

He repeats it, but I still can’t tell what he’s saying.

‘I’m sorry, you’ll need to say that one more time,’ I tell him. ‘I just want to make sure I’m hearing you properly.’

He tells me that I don’t have a sufficient number of eggs to freeze, those aren’t the exact words he uses, but he says something along those lines in Swedish. I catch his every word this time.

‘Oh, I see,’ I say.

I look out of the window, there’s a bird dropping on the windowpane that I hadn’t noticed before now. Seagulls. A sailboat passes by out on the fjord, a craft with a huge sail. I wonder what it’s called, who’s on board, where they’re headed.

‘Have I been too direct?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I reply. ‘No, no. I’d rather you were direct. I can take it.’

‘But you had perhaps thought this might be the case,’ he says. ‘You are forty, after all.’

I’ve started to cry even though I don’t want to, there’s nothing to cry about, and he can hear it, my voice is thick, my nose sounds blocked, it seems so obvious that I ought to have considered things might go this way, sitting here now I can’t fathom why I hadn’t, what with me being forty years old. 113

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. He’d noticed the small number of eggs during my ultrasound, he explains, but he’d decided it would be better to have the discussion with me after my results came back.

He carries on talking, says something about how many hormone treatments I would need if there was to be any hope of my having enough eggs to freeze, he couldn’t recommend it from a medical point of view and, moreover, it would be expensive. I interject, ask him if pregnancy will ever be possible for me. He hesitates.

‘There’s always a slim chance,’ he says. ‘As long as you’re still having regular periods. But, you know. People ought to be having children when they’re thirty, but that doesn’t work for everyone, then all of a sudden, they realise they’ve put it off for too long. It’s ever so sad, but these things happen from time to time.’

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Chapter 17