So, I don’t want Lorna – or worse, Pierre – to have the meeting with Miles without me. Don’t get me wrong, Pierre, Lorna’s husband, has been very helpful over the last few months, and him re-vamping the office computer system with a much-needed upgrade was a job I would never have got around to. The problem is, I’m not sure how long he’s going to stay ‘helping’.

I said he could come in, as a favour to Lorna, really. He’d been sitting at home twiddling his thumbs since he got fired from his job in finance (unfairly apparently) at the end of last summer. Lorna made the good point that it’s ridiculous to have someone with the business nous of Pierre at our disposal and not use him, so I said he could come in. But I can’t help feeling that he’s got his feet too far under the table and wants to change everything. And Lorna seems to dote on his every word.

The door opens and the nurse comes in. She’s wearing a blue smock and she checks the dangling watch on her chest before smiling at me and sitting down in the chair with a sigh, as if it’s good to be off her feet. ‘So, Mrs Beck…’

‘Oh please. Just call me Keira,’ I say. I don’t like being Mrs Beck. It gives me too much in common with my battle-axe of a mother-in-law. I kept my maiden name for the business and I’m used to being Keira Wishwell at work.

‘Keira,’ she smiles, ‘thanks for waiting.’

‘Do you know how long this will take?’ I ask, looking at my phone, as I slide it into my handbag on the floor. The big clock on the screensaver says 10.08, which means Lorna will almost certainly have to face Miles alone. Shit.

‘Well that depends…’

‘On what?’

She shuffles her bottom on the chair. ‘Well you see, after your first mammogram, before Christmas, we’ve called you back because…’

Something in her tone makes my ears prick up like a prairie dog’s. I’m under the impression I’ve been called back to the breast clinic as a routine kind of thing. That’s what they said might happen. People get called back all the time.

She holds my gaze. ‘… because we can see some unusual breast tissue.’

Breast tissue?

BOOM!

I’m in the quiet room.

It only dawns on me now that she’s brought me in here with the plastic dahlias to deliver bad news. Is this bad news?

‘Unusual how?’ My voice is squeaky and quivery, not like my voice at all.

Ten minutes later, still not having been told anything conclusive, I’m ushered through to the mammogram room and another lady introduces herself as Sinitta and it’s on the tip of my tongue to start singing ‘So Macho’, that Eighties hit by the singer Sinitta, which this Sinitta is probably far too young to remember, or appreciate at all. She’s also in a lab coat and has an intense stare as she looks at my notes.