‘You’re lucky to have such obedient hair, Martha,’ she would say while brushing it ready for a day at school, ‘it’s so perfectly thick and straight, it will always do what you want it to do.’

In contrast her sister, Willow, had baby-fine blonde hair that had a careless way about it. As a girl, Willow’s plaits had nearly always worn themselves loose by the time the lunchtime bell rang.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Tom was chopping onions with an ostentatious dexterity he had learned while on a cookery course Martha had given him for his fortieth birthday earlier that year. An avid fan of Masterchef, he never missed an episode, he loved to cook. He read cookery books the way most people read novels, devouring them page by page, word by word.

‘There’s a bottle of wine open in the fridge,’ he said, tipping the onions into a large ceramic frying pan.

When she’d poured out two glasses of Cloudy Bay, Martha asked him how his day had gone.

‘Oh, you know, same old same old for a Monday,’ he said, deftly crushing a garlic clove beneath the blade of a knife by banging it with his fist. ‘How about you?’

She tried to think back to her day in the office, before she came home with the pregnancy test kit and the day was ruined. Before that small seed of hope that had taken root in the last few days was ripped from her. Before she felt … well, never mind all that. ‘A bit like yours,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Same old same old.’

He smiled and added the garlic to the frying pan. ‘Pass me those mushrooms, will you?’

She did as he said, then sipped her wine. Her friends and family said she was lucky to have married a man like Tom, a man who was the perfect embodiment of patience and so handy in the kitchen. They were right; she was lucky. A previous boyfriend had dumped her with the damning criticism that she was too organised and sensible. She didn’t think she’d ever felt more insulted, but had then rallied with the acknowledgement that she was who she was, and that was that.

Amazingly Tom loved her for just that reason.

‘If I wanted an impractical and empty-headed girlfriend, I wouldn’t now be sitting here with you,’ he’d said when she’d warned him what she was like on their third date. She hadn’t seen any point in things progressing between them if he was hoping to discover that hiding beneath the tough exterior there was actually a hopelessly incapable girl longing to have her life organised by a strong man. There really wasn’t.

As for how she felt about Tom; she loved him with her head as much as her heart. She loved that he regarded the two of them the way she did, as an equal partnership, a strong team that together could face any challenge thrown at them.

Their life goals were probably the same as most people’s – the desire for a fulfilling work life, combined with having children and a nice home. Two of those things they had accomplished with relative ease, it was just the small matter of conception they had yet to achieve.