They have downloaded a flight-tracking app, at first a joke, but it’s become oddly addictive, pointing a phone at a plane in the sky and waiting for the shiver and beep of information. The planes are normally mundane: from 105Zurich or Frankfurt or Dublin or Aberdeen, almost all going to Heathrow, but occasionally they catch a Qantas flight, or the UPS from Louisville International to Cologne Bonn, or a private jet with all flight information obscured.

Adjo is late home from work and she is on the terrace when he finds her.

Hey, he says, clambering through the window and dropping down beside her, into the other of the rickety bentwood chairs they rescued from a skip.

Hey, she says, and she bends to pour the last few gulps of her water bottle into the plants, so that he doesn’t have to see her face for a few moments longer.

Oh God, he says, and then again: Oh God.

They walk together to the Costcutter; a bottle of Chardonnay, overmarketed, overpriced.

We could carry on to Oddbins, he says, get something a bit nicer?

It’s not a celebration, she says. It comes out more harshly than she intends.

Back home he cooks dinner, a little sheepishly, because he’s still hungry, even if she’s not, and she sits on a stool and watches him, sleeves rolled up around his biceps, the way he chops like a chef, left hand covering the blade, and she stops abruptly midway through her second glass of wine, just in case, and finally starts to cry.

That night she dreams of a house, a sprawling clapboard house beside the sea, white porch wrapped round three 106sides, and roses twining up the portico. She walks up the steps and onto the porch, down the side and around, in time to see a shining lady leading a little girl away. In the dream the lady turns to look at her, but the little girl does not; in the dream she doesn’t even try to ask them to stay. She wakes up shaking and when he tries to comfort her, shrugs him viciously away.

They meet at lunch, an hour before the appointment, and wander aimlessly round the streets by the hospital, the lowrise estates with their shabby patches of communal grass, broken glass and dogshit and tangles of neglected roses, the occasional syringe. They perch on a low brick wall and Adjo reaches for her hand.

I did some googling, he says. It could be nothing. It could be – implantation.

The word is soft and apologetic in his mouth.

Yeah, she says. I just don’t think so.

No, he says.

The GP didn’t, either. I mean, that’s why she—

Yeah, he says. Yeah.

On the phone, without even seeing me.

Yeah, he says again. After a bit, he says, We’re on the same side here.

I know. I’m sorry. I know.