‘If you say so.’

She could tell he wasn’t really listening to her; his attention was focused on the enormous screen that took up most of the battleship-grey breeze-block wall. The TV was so large it almost felt like Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming were in the room with them. Her own attention wavering from the complexity of the plot – she’d lost her grip on it several episodes ago – she tried to imagine a baby in this freakishly tidy apartment. It was bad enough the clutter Willow had brought with her when she moved in (most of which had been shoved into a cupboard), heaven only knew what a child would do to it. She knew from friends that babies gathered stuff to them faster than a snowball rolling down a mountainside.

‘I was thinking,’ said Rick, his hand still winding a lock of her hair around his fingers, ‘that it might be better to chuck in your job now rather than keep going until you’re the size of a hot-air balloon.’

‘Hey,’ she said with a playful kick of her foot against his, ‘who says I’m going to be the size of a hot-air balloon?’

‘Okay, an inflatable dinghy.’

‘Not that either!’ she said.

‘Seriously though, why carry on with a job which will just wear you out and which doesn’t even pay that well?’

‘It might not be a huge salary, but it’s better than nothing,’ she said. She kept to herself that she would miss the camaraderie of her work colleagues. It had been fun this evening at the pub after their shift when they’d all had a jolly good grumble about how impossible it was to reach their daily targets.

‘But we have my salary,’ Rick said. ‘It’ll easily stretch to cover us both.’

‘And don’t forget the baby,’ she reminded him.

‘How could I?’ he said happily. He then pointed the remote control at the screen and paused it. ‘Why not stop working and enjoy some time at home preparing for our Little Bug? You could decorate the nursery and start buying all those things we’re going to need.’

‘Don’t you think it might be tempting fate to prepare so soon?’

He put the remote control down and put his hand to her neck. He gave the four-leaf clover necklace he’d given her a little tug. ‘That’s why I gave you this,’ he said. ‘To bring us extra luck. And didn’t you just say how lucky you were?’

Thinking that sometimes luck wasn’t enough, Willow was about to sit up, when he held her down.

‘But it would help the odds enormously in our favour if you didn’t go out drinking with your mates and keep it from me,’ he said.

She frowned. ‘I thought that was forgiven and forgotten?’

‘I’m just reiterating the point that it was irresponsible of you, and if anything was going to tempt fate and make something go wrong, that’s just the kind of thing that would. By the way, did you take your vitamin D tablet today and the folic acid supplement?’