Then I woke up.

The dream left me feeling unsettled; a feeling that, if I was honest, I hadn’t been able to shake since the day I found out I was pregnant.

I had delayed taking the test until I was sure my period was three days late – and even then I promised myself I would wait until the following morning to take it because you’re meant to get a more accurate result first thing. Jason had pulled an all-nighter at work the night before, and at 10 a.m. sent a text to say that they still weren’t finished and he would probably be home very late again. ‘At least I’m clocking up the overtime. I can probably afford that trip to Paris I’ve been promising you,’ he quipped, in an effort to placate me. It was hard to tell over text whether he was being sarcastic or not, and it was typical that he happened to be on an all-nighter at the exact same time that I was going to discover if we were pregnant. I knew he’d be so excited too and I wanted to share the moment with him. But the suspense was killing me. It was a moment I’d waited for, for some time. Jason might describe us as ‘casually’ trying, but it was anything but casual for me.

Jason and I had been open about our desire to have children since we’d started dating six years ago, so once we had got married three years later in Hong Kong I imagined we would start trying straight away, but Jason had been adamant about laying stronger foundations for our financial security before we did. When he’d been transferred to the London branch of the city trading firm he worked for in Hong Kong, ‘Project: Baby’ had been nearly ready to begin, and when he’d racked up a reasonable amount of overtime after a few months, it had finally been green-lit. But then another whole year had passed, without a hint of a pregnancy. Admittedly, neither of us had been fastidious about keeping track of the all-important dates in my cycle for the first six months, but I then began paying close attention. With Jason’s increasingly erratic work schedule, it had sometimes been challenging to pencil in any night of hot sex, let alone on the days I’d been most fertile. And whenever we had found ourselves able to spend a cosy evening at home together, one of us – mostly Jason – hadn’t felt up for it. Scheduled sex had never felt less sexy. When he rebuffed an advance, I had sometimes got the impression that perhaps Jason wasn’t ready to be a father yet, but I had pushed these thoughts out of my mind and carried on. As the weeks had passed, my wish to fall pregnant had grown stronger and stronger; I recalled myself as a young girl pushing my dolly around in the miniature pram Dad had bought me. She was called Brenda. I had loved that doll so much. A strong maternal instinct had been in me from such a young age so when it didn’t happen as quickly as I always imagined it would, I began to get superstitious about it.