Now as he drove through the early morning traffic, Tom felt a wave of guilty shame, remembering the reason why he had looked at the calendar.

He had been counting up the days until Martha would be ovulating next.

Counting the days when he would be off duty.

Counting the days until it would start all over again and once more the pressure would be on.

Chapter Five

The 7.57 a.m. train from Cobham & Stoke D’Abernon station to London Waterloo was crowded and running thirteen minutes late. It was not an uncommon occurrence, but all the same, it annoyed Martha; she hated to arrive anywhere late.

The large man sitting next to her was taking up so much room he was spilling over into her seat. The intrusion into her personal space made her almost nostalgic for the socially-distanced days of the coronavirus. With no room to use her laptop, she took out her mobile to check her emails. Scrolling through them, she flagged up the ones she would deal with later and deleted anything of no interest. She was ruthless when it came to decluttering her devices. She was the Marie Kondo of screen technology!

Actually, she was quite a fan of the KonMari concept and when it first became popular, she had put it to good use at home with Tom. They were both naturally tidy people, another reason why they were so compatible, and had once spent a wet Bank Holiday weekend together systematically emptying all their cupboards, even the attic. They’d jettisoned anything they agreed was superfluous to their lives. Clothes they hadn’t worn in ages, books they would never reread, cheap badminton rackets they would never use again, boxes of, well, just stuff that wasn’t relevant to who they were now as people; it was all put into bin bags and either taken to the tip or put ready for their local charity shop. Neither she nor Tom had a sentimental nature, so the task wasn’t difficult for them. By the time they’d finished, she had been filled with an extraordinary sense of empowered wellbeing. She’d felt thoroughly cleansed and more in control.

When the train finally pulled into Waterloo and she was hurrying along the crowded platform towards the underground, and remembering how upset she’d been the other night in bed – how pathetically useless she’d felt – she wondered if she needed to repeat the KonMari process. Would it make her feel more in control again? Because as things were, her inability to get pregnant made her feel powerless. She hated the growing sensation that she was up against some unknown force that was preventing her from having the child she so badly wanted.

She bought her usual latte from the coffee shop in the foyer of the building where Brand New Designs had their offices, and took the lift up to the tenth floor.

Settled at her desk, her computer switched on, she was ready for the day. Here at least she could throw her energy into thinking of something other than not being pregnant.