Probably he was just apprehensive. That was fair enough: so was I. And even if he was finding the whole thing a bit daunting, I had complete faith that he wanted to be the best dad it was possible to be.

We took a taxi to the hospital so we wouldn’t have to worry about finding a space in the invariably crowded car park, and arrived with plenty of time to spare. There was a newsagent’s in the little row of shops just inside the entrance, and Mark suggested going in to browse before heading to the waiting room.

‘I thought you had work to be getting on with,’ I said. Mark had brought his briefcase with him; he was dressed in a suit, so he could go straight on to the office afterwards.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t mind looking at the things I might read if I had time.’

Inside the newsagent’s, Mark went to look at the display of books by the tills and I headed towards the rows of women’s magazines. I’d become a walking collection of pregnancy clichés; my attention span was shot, and all I wanted was a soothing drip-feed of familiar themes – makeovers, problems overcome – that would distract me from the prospect of giving birth. In spite of the birth plan and the classes and so on, if I was honest I was dreading it.

I didn’t actually hear what Mark said to her to start with.

I looked up to see him standing next to her. She was nothing special: a tired-looking woman who’d just finished paying at the checkout. She had a sulky little girl with her, and she didn’t seem at all like the kind of person that Mark would know.

I heard what he said next, though. He was looking down at the little girl, and he said, ‘So who’s this?’

The woman nudged the girl to move aside so that other customers could make their way from the tills to the exit. She mumbled a name I didn’t catch, and then the girl piped up: ‘I hurt myself on the iron. Mummy unplugged it and left it on the worktop, and I climbed up to sit on the windowsill behind it and I touched it with my leg and it burned me.’

She pointed to the bandage around her knee; she was wearing school uniform under her coat, a red jumper with a sensible grey skirt and slightly drooping socks.

‘I was very brave and didn’t cry at all,’ she went on. ‘But Mummy said we should have it looked at, so we took Ellie to school and then we came here.’

Mark said, ‘Ellie—?’

‘My youngest,’ the woman said.

‘She’s only four,’ the little girl said disdainfully. ‘It’s just as well we didn’t have to bring her, because I think she would have got very bored waiting and been naughty and played up.’

‘We should get you back to school,’ the woman said. I had moved so that I was standing by Mark, but she didn’t acknowledge me at all, or even glance in my direction. ‘Come on, Ava.’