“I don’t think we should go down the IVF route,” Tom had said, when I’d suggested it after a couple of years of trying for a baby. “It can do so much damage to marriages. People tend to get obsessed with it; it’s all they can think about.”

It was all I could think about anyway. I knew he was right, though. If I’d had hospital appointments and treatment and so on, I knew what I’d be like. I’d be totally obsessed.

“And we know we can have children,” he said. “I have Josh. We have Josh. You know he sees you as family.” He gave me a sympathetic smile. “And, well, you were pregnant, too.”

I winced, hating to think of that time in my life. When I was eighteen and about to go to university, I discovered I was pregnant by a boy from school that I’d been seeing for a few months. I hadn’t known whether to go through with it or not, but decided to go ahead, to defer university for a year, and to have the baby. A couple of days after the twelve-week scan, the baby clearly thought otherwise.

“If we just keep on trying, we’ll be lucky. They’ll come one day.”

But they hadn’t. It wasn’t for want of trying, though. Soon Tom was waiting with me, month after month, buying me pregnancy tests, holding me as I sobbed each time the words Not pregnant were revealed. I thought of the soft toy he’d bought me right at the start, the first time we tried to get pregnant. He’d come home with it, a long, soft, furry dog, the color of caramel with treacle toffee eyes and the floppiest ears. When you squeezed its ear it made a barking noise and Tom nicknamed him Captain Barker, saying it was clear that the dog should be a higher rank than a mere mister. When he gave it to me that first night, we were so full of hope and promise for the future and we’d laughed so much I’d cried with happiness. Over the months and years the dog moved from the armchair in our room to the wardrobe in the spare room and eventually, just before I moved out, I took it to a charity shop for another baby to have. A real baby.

I thought of the dog’s new owner that afternoon in my flat, sitting at the window not knowing whether it was my tears or the rain that blurred my vision, and wondered whether they could smell my perfume, feel the hope that clung to the dog for all those years. I hoped they could, hoped they never felt the despair that led me to give it away.

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