I diverted my attention to our barely used kitchen cupboards, stooping down to poke around, looking for a dish I wasn’t even sure we still had. We’d had to shed a lot of stuff when we moved back from Hong Kong two years ago.

‘Crockery doesn’t travel well,’ Jason had reminded me at every opportunity. He didn’t have the same sentimentality for belongings as me. That was another thing I had inherited from Mum, a self-confessed ‘hoarder’.

Jason came up behind me, spreading his hands over my bump from behind. He laced his fingers with mine, and I reciprocated, despite the fact I’d rarely felt less sexy than I did right now – all swollen breasts, water retention in my legs, rounder-than-usual face. At thirty-five weeks and three days, I was rapidly getting too big for even my biggest maternity clothes. I didn’t understand those women in Cosmopolitan who claimed they felt sexier up the duff.

‘You look sexy today,’ he whispered into my neck, between peppering it with little kisses. ‘I wish I didn’t have to work.’

‘You were late home again last night,’ I muttered.

‘You were still awake though.’

‘I wasn’t,’ I replied, remembering how he had pushed himself into my back, in an attempt to gauge whether I could be warmed up for sex. Of course I was having none of it. We both knew that I had pretended to be asleep or had blamed my bump when rebuffing his sexual advances countless times in the last few months. Much as I fancied my husband, I just couldn’t face sex at the moment. I wasn’t sure how much more rejection he could take.

‘You were just pretending to be asleep!’ he protested.

As any woman who has ever been eight months pregnant knows, it’s practically impossible to be sound asleep anyway. Especially when your husband comes to bed late, having slammed the front door, which is just beneath your bedroom, and then starts trying to unbutton your maternity pyjamas, pestering you for sex.

I shook my head.

‘Right, sure. Well the little snorts you were making weren’t very authentic.’ He was humouring me. Sometimes Jason didn’t seem to grasp that my feelings about my body were not the same as they once were. Just because I had porn-star worthy boobs right now, didn’t mean they made me feel sexy. In fact, the opposite was true: I missed my B cups.

I poked around in the cupboard for a few seconds longer before realizing this crouching position was ill-advised for a woman in my condition and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get back up again.

‘Need a hand?’ He slid his hands under my armpits. ‘Aren’t you supposed to stop doing things like this now?’

‘I can do it, thanks.’ I shook him off and rose to my feet in a graceless fashion, steadying myself on the kitchen table and feeling like an overweight elephant in women’s clothing. It was hard to imagine there was a time when we’d had sex on this very table.