As if he could hear my thoughts, he appeared at the doorway. Seeing my red eyes, he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and drew me into his chest to comfort me.

‘Your mum would be so proud of you right now,’ he whispered.

It turned out to be a long evening. I spent a lot of it pacing around the flat, or trying to watch some episodes of Killing Eve which wasn’t exactly restful – not that it mattered, given I couldn’t concentrate on anything anyway. Unlike Jason, who was gripped.

The next contraction came a few hours after the first, and then both of us forgot to check the time of the next couple, but they were certainly not frequent. The pain, though; it was so raw. Could I be further along than the timings led us to believe? I even put my phone onto the stopwatch setting alongside his, in case his was wrong. Was it really going to get worse than this? I couldn’t bear it.

Jason was leafing through my Baby Group notes.

‘It says you shouldn’t go to hospital until the contractions are at least five minutes apart, or you will risk being sent home again,’ he read out authoritatively. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got a way to go yet, baby.’ He gazed up at me. ‘Fancy a game of Uno?’

‘Uno?’ I looked at him as though he were insane. ‘Do I look like I want to play Uno?’

‘Okay, well what about the playlist? We could go over the playlist?’ He reached for his iPhone, taking it off the stopwatch setting. He was obviously trying hard to distract me from the fear of another contraction.

‘Don’t worry about the playlist!’ I shrieked. The last thing I wanted to listen to was Salt’n’Pepa’s ‘Push It’. We had compiled it together over two months ago, when the birth felt like a distant diary date, a fun event, even, and we mistakenly thought Salt’n’Pepa might lighten the mood. It didn’t seem so entertaining right now. All I wanted was a dark room and some pain relief.

The next few hours passed in a slow haze filled with toast and mugs of herbal tea. Jason gathered the last bits for my hospital bag and I spent much of the time standing by the window, leaning into the ledge and shifting the weight between my feet, as Maggie had suggested might help. After a few stretches, I gazed up and across at the backs of the houses on the street behind ours, noticing, as time passed, how lights were gradually being extinguished downstairs as the occupants took themselves upstairs to bed. I wondered how many women all around the globe, in different continents and situations, of different colours, religions and levels of wealth, were on the verge of this life-changing moment too. Whatever our background or circumstance, we were all together now, and we had to dig deep. I thought of Susie and wondered if she was still in labour. Everything had gone a little quiet on the WhatsApp thread. We hadn’t heard any more about Susie after the ‘fucking painful’ message. Helen had responded: