‘I managed to convince myself that joining their Baby Group was the best way to see Jason again. But once I was in the class, I knew it was a terrible, terrible mistake. He was so filled with venom towards me. The pain he caused me when he told me he’d known about the abortion all along came flooding back and it hit me hard. But as I became friends with Aisha – with his wife – the secret, as well as my baby bump, grew bigger and bigger. I knew she didn’t deserve to be treated this way; that she deserved better than Jason; but I couldn’t see a way out.’

I hung my head low in shame. Sometimes I questioned my own sanity; saying it all out loud, it sounded like the doings of a mad, vengeful person. Was that what I had become?

It seemed absurd to think I could ever have been in love with Jason and built him up to be some kind of Adonis in my head, when the person I needed the most was right here under my nose all along. Oscar.

‘I wish I’d never joined that group because, if I hadn’t, none of this would have happened and I wouldn’t have had to unearth “that night” again.’ The dragging weight of the past made my head feel heavy and my eyes fill with tears.

Oscar had now finished my glass of wine. ‘Let’s move downstairs and get another,’ he whispered. I felt relieved he wasn’t exploding with rage, but his calmness was unnerving.

I walked down the stairs behind him and sat at the breakfast bar. I watched his back and arms as he refilled his glass and poured another, purposely keeping his body turned away from me, perhaps as a means of disconnecting for a bit. I wondered what he was thinking. I felt such enormous love for him. If anyone was worth fighting for, it was Oscar.

When he joined me on a stool at the counter I continued: ‘When you told me you didn’t want children, I had to split up with you,’ I said. ‘Having a baby has been one of the biggest desires in my life, and in my late thirties it became an obsession. I couldn’t imagine a future with you without children.’ I paused, pondering for a moment whether to go on.

‘Well Lucy, you got your baby.’ He turned his face away from me, so I couldn’t read his expression.

I swallowed hard in an effort to compose myself and continue. ‘Jason was the only man to have got me pregnant naturally, albeit twenty years ago. Subconsciously, when I was with him that evening, my body reawakened. I had imagined seeing him again so many times in my head over the years, and now it was really happening. Childhood sweethearts, reunited. It was such a romantic notion. But it was a baby I longed for, it wasn’t him. I know that now.’

In sentences punctuated with tears, I described how I had lived with the grief and guilt of terminating that baby for so long. It felt as though only now, now that I had become a mother again and held my own child in my arms, I could process the emotion I had blocked out.