So although her instinct told her that she never wanted to be pregnant, she spent a long time considering the options. James working at FullLife didn’t make it inevitable – she always made up her own mind. She wasn’t afraid of childbirth the way some women were; in fact she would have relished the challenge. But the idea of carrying a growing life inside her for nine months just felt wrong. It felt unfair. She wanted to take the best possible care of her baby but she also wanted to work fifty per cent of the time, equally with James. She didn’t want to be the only one worrying during pregnancy – she wanted the worry to be equally shared. So it seemed far more sensible for the baby to be safely cocooned outside their bodies, where they could take joint responsibility for its care.

And James was such a gentle kind of man. He loved carrying the pouches. He practically glowed with pleasure when he felt a kick, when the warmth of the pouch was pressed against him and he’d lean down to whisper about how miraculous our understanding of life was. And it had been wonderful, once the children were born, to see how close they were. She wasn’t sure if they’d have been so close, had he not carried them in the pouch. FullLife understood, of course, they’d built their company on it.

So they’d both had the careers they’d wanted, and been the kind of parents they’d wanted. After the twins were born she’d been appointed to the board of directors at the airport. James had been offered more supervisory roles, but he turned them down. He just loved working in that lab. He was even more inspired once he was a dad – he used to talk about finding ways for the babies in the pouches to experience all the beauty of the world. Sensory inputs became his main focus. Well, until he was moved into a new lab to study what was going wrong. And he’d lied to her about it. Why did he do that?

Was it because he’d become ashamed?