She hesitated. ‘Thank you. I don’t know if I said, but I’m Suzi.’ Later, I would turn that line over in my head, looking for hidden meaning.

As she sat in my living room, I noticed she had her phone in the pocket of her cardigan, and kept fingering it as we spoke. Waiting for a call, clearly, or a text. One that hadn’t come, and I didn’t think it was Nick’s. She was so nervy too – she jumped when a tree branch scratched the window, spilling tea on her jeans. ‘Crap! I’m sorry. It’s the pregnancy, it’s made me so clumsy.’ At least she’d opened up about that now – foolish to try to hide it, when it was so obvious. I wondered if she was the kind of person who was good at pretending things weren’t real.

There was so much I wanted to ask her now she was here, inside my house, but nerves made me tongue-tied. I was so curious to meet the husband. She talked about him a lot during our tea. ‘Nick hates it when I forget to start dinner.’ ‘Nick’s always on at me to shut the gate, in case the dog gets out.’ ‘Nick says Poppet needs at least an hour’s walk a day, but it’s so hard in the frost. I’m afraid I’ll slip.’ The opening was there. I was standing in the kitchen doorway, drying a china cup with a tea towel. It had been my mother’s set, a wedding present, printed with small blue cornflowers.

I said, ‘I could come with you, if you like. I’ve been meaning to walk more. And that way I could fetch help, if anything happened.’

She reacted with too much pleasure. ‘Amazing! I would love that. I’m such a disaster, really, I need someone to make me go.’

For some reason, Suzi had thoroughly internalised the message that she wasn’t good enough. That she was bad somehow. I wanted to find out if that was true. ‘How are you feeling, with the pregnancy?’

She put her hands on her stomach. ‘Pretty good, now the sickness has stopped. It was so unexpected. We tried in London, but I guess I never really thought it would work.’ She blushed slightly. ‘And now – well, it’s happening. I can’t get my head around it.’

‘Nick must be pleased,’ I probed.

Her face paled and I wondered why. ‘He’s thrilled. He worries I don’t eat right during the day, or I’ll slip in the fields or something.’ And yet he’d got her a dog that she had to walk for an hour a day. I found that interesting.