‘Maybe just the bump,’ Francesco said. ‘If you call your bump Nigel I’ll throw you a mini Nigel party, and then when he comes out we won’t mention it again but we can sleep soundly knowing we’ve done our part.’

‘Great plan, Nigel Superfan, but I won’t ever have a bump, so. Your plan is foiled.’

She could hear Francesco’s brain whirring down the line. ‘You don’t want children?’ he said. ‘I thought you were really excited to one day be a mum. That really surprises me.’ He paused. ‘You once asked me about adoption, actually. Is that the plan?’

‘Well,’ said Penny, slowly. ‘I do want children, it’s just I can’t carry them myself. Something-something-cancer, something-something-early-menopause … was going to freeze my eggs but then decided to get them fertilized with donor sperm so we could check for the cancer gene and I wouldn’t have to spend years wondering what the deal was … now I have embryos in storage at a central London fertility clinic … blah blah blah … I won’t get a bump, but a surrogate will. Maybe Clementine. So. We’d have to ask her how she feels about a bump called Nigel.’

Francesco went quiet. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘That’s because I never told you,’ Penny murmured.

‘I feel like an idiot now. I was just being stupid.’

‘No,’ said Penny. ‘No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel foolish. I would have told you when we first met, but then …’

‘Everything happened.’

‘Everything happened, yeah.’

‘Well. It doesn’t surprise me that Penny Bridge has a plan.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? You see the problem and then you figure out how to make it work for you. You’re cool like that.’

‘Thank you for calling my fertility issues “cool”.’

Penny could tell Francesco was rolling his eyes. ‘That’s not what I said, Pen, is it?’

She sighed dramatically. ‘No. I was being cranky and unreasonable again. And also, that was a really clumsy way to tell you. I wanted to back when we were dating, weirdly. I felt like I had a secret from you, but there’s no good time to drop into conversation with someone you’re sleeping with that you’ve got this whole plan to have a baby that couldn’t ever technically involve them. Can you imagine? You’d have run a mile, either because I was bringing up kids so soon or because it’s a massive turn-off.’

‘I wouldn’t have run a mile, Penny,’ said Francesco. ‘Not for either reason. I really liked you.’ Hearing him say that made her heart beat faster, but she didn’t have time to register it because he kept talking. ‘I’m glad you’ve told me, okay?’

‘Thank you for knowing the right thing to say.’