Online, a lady had low, slow-doubling numbers and is now twelve weeks pregnant with twins. Another had a routine ultrasound before a D&C and the technician 109found a heartbeat. The stories spiral unpunctuated into one another, occasionally with updates from the OP, original poster; or others begging to know how things turned out.

She scrutinises the numbers on her single-sheet report, rereads them to see if there’s something she missed.

Gestational Sac: present.

Endometrial thickness: 25.0mm.

ßhCG: 141 IU/I, requires serial hCG levels to be measured to establish a trend.

Google has translated each one of these things for her. Each one of those things, in Google, throws up despair, but also portals of hope.

She waits for the slow heat of the first blossoming clot. But two days pass, then three, and nothing. At the weekend they walk the length of the canal and come to a garden centre. COFFEES, TEAS, ICED DRINKS! a painted board announces, though inside the vintage Piaggio van is out of service. They wander up and down the little gravelled paths, the apple trees in sacks, the bay trees sheared into pom-poms. She buys, on impulse, something called a rhodanthemum, or Moroccan daisy ‘Moondance’, because the name reminds her of the Van Morrison song; a plant called nemesia that smells of vanilla; a hot-pink cosmos called ‘Casanova Violet’. Back at the flat, lining them up on the lip of the terrace, she realises she needs proper pots, and compost to pot them in. A watering can. She should make 110a trellis for the stalk of jasmine too: get bamboo sticks and tie them into a lattice. Gardening string, or twine. They sit out all evening as usual. A Pakistan International Airlines flight, twelve minutes twelve seconds into its journey to Karachi. 26,075 feet, a speed of 424 knots. A Dublin flight, descending into London City, that’s swung right out to Southend-on-Sea on its approach path, now at 1,841 feet and a ground speed of 88 knots and one minute of flight time remaining.

They can calculate it to the nearest foot, she says, gazing at his phone. And I mean, that’s nothing: did you know they can work out to the nearest inch how far it is from any given point on earth to the moon? They both look up at the rising moon, pale in the sky.

To the nearest inch, she repeats.

There is a song she remembers her granny singing, a song her granny sang even after she’d lost the ability to have a conversation. Lady moon, lady moon, it went, Sailing so high, drop down to Baby, from out yonder sky. Babykin, babykin, far down below, I hear you calling, I hear you calling, I hear you calling, But oh I cannot go.