‘Just promise me you won’t put me through this if we have kids,’ he whispered as Lucy heaved herself out of her carrot-adorned throne and waddled towards us. ‘And whatever you do, don’t let them drag me into that cigar lounge.’

I mentally recorded his words, storing them in the safest corner of my brain so that they could be debated endlessly in the group text as soon as possible. I pressed my hand against my stomach to calm a strange feeling I wasn’t entirely sure I liked.

‘Lucy,’ Patrick let go of my hands to take Lucy by hers, kissing both of her cheeks and matching her beatific smile with one of his own. ‘I don’t want to be rude but you’ve put on a few pounds since I last saw you.’

‘Twenty-nine and a half,’ she said with pride. ‘I tried not to gain too much but, you know.’

‘You look radiant,’ he replied, instinctively choosing all the right words. Lucy beamed over at me and I smiled back. ‘When my sister had her first, she was tiny until her thirty-third week and then she blew up like a balloon. A gorgeous balloon but, you know.’

‘What? Your sister had a baby?’

Patrick’s sister was the most militant member of the anti-baby brigade I had ever encountered in my life. The first time I’d met her, she asked me if I wanted kids and when I said I didn’t know, she screamed in my face that I should be sterilized before I ‘panic-spawned’ in my late thirties. Such a charmer.

‘Two, actually,’ he replied. ‘Curtis is almost three and Manix just had his first birthday. I’d be amazed if there wasn’t a third before long, she’s dying for a girl. I’ve never known anyone take to motherhood like she has, she’s a natural.’

Quite the turnaround for a woman who wore a T-shirt that said ‘Feed Don’t Breed’ to her brother’s birthday dinner four years ago.

‘We haven’t told anyone our names,’ Lucy said, letting slip the light giggle she reserved for the opposite sex. ‘They’re top secret.’

‘You haven’t told anyone?’ Patrick replied, his eyes big and blue. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Dave made me promise I wouldn’t,’ she said, fanning herself with a cardboard lettuce leaf. ‘And you know anything I tell one of them immediately works its way around the entire group.’

‘You could tell me,’ he offered. ‘I swear I’ll take it to my grave.’

‘She’s not going to tell you,’ I said, somewhat stuck on the fact his sister had spawned. ‘It was eight months before she told me she’d lost her virginity.’