Stein and Mum have been together for six years now. Whenever he’s due to join us somewhere, I still wish he’d stay at home, that it could just be us. He doesn’t have any children of his own, I can’t picture him ever having wanted it any other way, and it’s as if he doesn’t really understand 20 how old Marthe and I are, he talks to us like teenagers. Mum says that she and Stein are late bloomers. Marthe and I flinch whenever she says it. It’s not even true, she was twenty when she married Dad, and look at how that turned out. I often want to ask if she’d rather have ended up like me, ended up, I think to myself, I can’t think about myself as ending up one way or another, as if everything’s over and done with, nothing is over and done with, you have to tell yourself that the best is yet to come, but at times I think that’s how Stein and Marthe and Kristoffer see me. They don’t know anything, I think to myself, I’ve got a plan, I’ve got a secret. I make up my mind to tell Marthe now, not to wait until this evening, I can tell her now, I’m going to freeze my eggs in Sweden, she’ll look at me wide-eyed and say wow.

‘So, what if I were to tell you I had some big news?’ Marthe says.

There’s something different about her expression, something serious beneath her smile, something quivers there. I look at her for a few seconds without getting it, but then I do.

‘Really?’ I ask.

‘Really,’ Marthe says, she’s smiling now, her eyes widen, tearful.

‘Wow,’ I say, sitting down on the bed beside her. ‘Really.’

As she sits there, waiting to say the words, I try to remember everything I’ve ever said to her, every stupid thing I’ve said, blabbing away about nights out and Stein and Mum. I quickly embrace her, she sobs gently, I hear a squeaking sound that seems to come from deep within her. 21

‘Fifteen weeks,’ she says without my asking, she sits up straight and dabs at her eyes. ‘I didn’t dare say anything before we could be absolutely sure.’

‘Shit,’ I say.

I don’t know what else to say. I’m so used to consoling her, hugging her and stroking her back and telling her everything will work itself out, taking her out to a bar every so often and buying her a few glasses of wine so she can think about something else, we have to enjoy the fact you can still have a drink, Marthe, and Kristoffer and Mum are always saying how good I am at talking Marthe around, looking after her. But this.

‘Things could still go wrong,’ I say.

Marthe looks at me and snorts with surprise.