I don’t think I could put my heart up for risk like that. If you have children, you have no idea what might happen to them. You have no idea who they will grow up to be, you have no idea if they will survive a long life, you have no idea how your relationship will pan out. All of these things frighten me to the core. People who say, ‘Oh but who will look after you when you’re old?’ always assume that you’d be friends with your kids later in life, and that they would live in the same country as you. But, actually, they might avoid you like the plague or badly fall out with you. It’s happened to me with my dad. He moved away, left my mum. My relationship with my dad is nonexistent, and I don’t think having a baby is a one-way ticket to having forever happiness or a new best friend. Children also move away, they might fall in love with someone on the other side of the world, reducing your relationship to an inconveniently timed Skype call. The idea of having a child frightens me for so many reasons, so many more than the horrors of childbirth itself. Perhaps I’m scared of having that much love. Too much love, to potentially lose.

27

2018

‘Are you telling me that you’ve strung me along for all these years?’ Jacob was marching up and down the living room, pulling at his hair. I’d never seen him look so stressed. Not even after that time he accidentally transferred £1,000 to the wrong account for his friend’s stag do.

‘I haven’t strung you along Jacob. I just … I didn’t really know,’ I said, defensively. I didn’t want to face it, I think.

‘Olive,’ he said, breathing heavily now. ‘You must have known. You must have thought at some point, during the nine years we’ve been together, that you didn’t want a family.’

‘I didn’t think about it that much! It wasn’t front of mind! We got together when we were twenty-four, I didn’t need to think about it.’

‘You must have had an inkling that we would get to this point, and you never said anything to me. Ever.’

‘Either one of us could have changed our minds over the last few years. How was I to know that you so desperately wanted this?’

‘I think when you have an idea that you probably don’t want kids, it’s something you should tell your partner, like, at the earliest opportunity.’

‘I knew we would cross that bridge when we came to it.’

‘I hate that phrase, crossing the stupid bridge.’

‘Jacob, stop shouting.’

‘I’m not shouting,’ he said, forcibly lowering his voice.

‘And please stop pinning all the blame on me.’

‘I’m not. I just don’t know what to say.’ He looked increasingly strained as he spoke, his face bleached of colour.

‘There’s nothing to say. We clearly want different things,’ I said, coldly.

‘Olive, I need a plan. Life is about having a plan.’