You are loved, even before you have a safe place to grow.

In less than twenty-four hours the transfer will have been done and I can start considering what else to say yes to. I just have to stay focused until then.

Chapter 23: Gemma

Tuesday 17 July

The clinic car park is almost empty when Dad and I arrive. I prefer my appointments early, so I don’t have to face the couples in the waiting room.

I’m not a jealous person and I don’t crave what they have. I crave what I used to have with Andrew. Which is why I’m here, kicking back against what death took away.

‘This could be it, Little Gem,’ my father says as I buzz the intercom.

But if it’s not, then what?

The fertility counsellor talked it through with me: I could make an active choice to leave the last embryo unused. Except then I’d always wonder if that would have been the one that made me a mum. Deep down, I think I’ve known I would see it through to the end.

But Dan’s made everything as clear as mud. Why am I thinking of him again here, of all places?

My father takes hold of my hand and squeezes it. ‘Let’s try to think positive, Gemma. It might help.’

Andrew was the biggest positive thinker I’d ever met, right to the end, and it didn’t help him.

But I smile at my dad. ‘I am positivity personified.’

The second we walk into the consultation room I can tell something is wrong. The doctor – one I haven’t met before – has adopted the guarded facial expression they must teach at medical school, the one that subliminally prepares patients for shitty news. He’s younger than I like my doctors to be, late thirties. I prefer greying consultants with a reassuring aura of wisdom.

He shakes our hands, waits for us to sit down, blinks. ‘I’m afraid that the blastocyst we’d earmarked for the transfer today has not survived the thawing process.’

Not survived. He means dead.

Our embryo is dead.

I’m shivering uncontrollably.

‘Oh, Gemma.’ Dad stands up and holds me, and after a minute or so I manage to stop shaking. He sits back down, his face closed in, as he tries to disguise how upset he is.

‘We have the option of trying the last blastocyst we have in storage. Your endometrium is in the ideal state for transfer.’

What the doctor said makes perfect sense, practically, medically and financially. But it’d also mean today is the end of the line. I haven’t realized until now how much I’ve been relying on having a final roll of the dice, if this month fails.

‘You’re welcome to take a few minutes to think it through. It’s bad luck, this morning’s failure. There’s no reason why the last one shouldn’t survive thawing.’

I wish he wouldn’t keep saying ‘the last one’.