Audrey nods but she cannot find the words to articulate how she is feeling. She fears that if she tries, all that will emerge will be a persistent, fearful howl.

“Look, I don’t want you to worry about anything. I’ll go to the town hall in the morning, inquire about marriage licenses. I think you can get them pretty quickly these days. And then we’ll tell our parents. You haven’t told yours yet, have you? OK, well, I’ll come with you. We’ll tell them together. It’ll be much easier for them to accept if they know we’re getting married.”

Audrey listens to him talking and envies him his clarity, his certainty, his unambiguous sense of purpose. It is a decisiveness, she knows, that should reassure her. She has a sense that in a parallel world there is a version of herself whose lungs are inflating with relief and gratitude. But the Audrey sitting here, opposite Edward right now, feels his words slip into her chest and clatter against her ribs, demanding to be let out.

“But what about my university place?” Her voice sounds small and she wonders whether she has managed to say the words out loud. But then he turns over her hand, squeezes her fingers, and she cannot discern whether the clamminess between their flesh belongs to him or to her.

“Audrey, we’re having a baby. And I want to be with you—with both of you. Maybe you can go to university later, when the baby’s gone to school?”

Audrey stares down at their hands, notices how neat his clipped fingernails are in contrast to hers, bitten to the quick.

Edward is six years older than Audrey—six years wiser, she has always believed—and there is a kindness about him she finds reassuring. He is steady and reliable: a junior aviation strategist for the British Overseas Airways Corporation who has enjoyed a quiet, unblemished journey through private school and university. He is not maverick or spontaneous in the way that Audrey’s friends’ boyfriends usually are. But then, those boys always break girls’ hearts. And one thing Audrey is sure of is that Edward would never break anyone’s heart.

Audrey loves Edward, she is in no doubt about that. She has just never imagined spending the rest of her life with him. She has never, in truth, imagined spending the rest of her life with anyone. While most of her friends daydream about weddings and motherhood, Audrey saves her dreams for a dark mahogany desk in a university English department, library books stretching from the floor to the ceiling and lecture halls filled with students taking notes from her meticulously prepared lessons. For years she has secretly harbored the fantasy that if she works hard enough, and believes in herself, a future in academia may await her. It is a dream, she knows, that stretches her imagination to its limits, yet one which, in moments of fortitude, she dares to believe might come true.

Now, suddenly, that dream seems to be little more than a childish fantasy.