I blink away the memory as Helena outlines possible side effects – nausea, cramping, dizziness – and gives me the instructions for taking the second pill. Then she hands me the first pill and a glass of water. I stare at them, suddenly unable to move. Helena had already asked me if I was completely certain a few minutes earlier as she gave me the consent form, and I had nodded my head in a kind of daze and signed it. However, the sight of the pill, the finality and enormity of what I am about to do, makes me suddenly question myself. This is a baby, a life I have created. Two days ago I had stupidly looked up the dates on a pregnancy app and saw that at seven weeks, as the baby now was, it was forming its brain and hands and limbs. As I sit here looking at the small white pill, itself no bigger than the baby in my womb, I feel wretched, like a woman about to jump off a cliff. Then Helena asks me if I’m okay, if I want to proceed, and I’m hauled back into the moment. This is not a baby, I tell myself, this is the result of something I cannot remember. And it’s my body, my choice. I put the pill in my mouth and swallow it down.

I can’t go back to the flat until this is all over. I can’t go to Lottie’s as she’s no longer there and I don’t want to tell Georgie and Jack, so I end up booking myself into a cheap hotel on Putney Bridge. It isn’t luxurious, but it is clean and private, somewhere I can lock myself away, undisturbed, for a couple of days. I told Connor that I was going to Edinburgh for a series of meetings with retailers. On the way to the hotel I go into the Waitrose Local in Putney and buy a couple of tubs of pasta salad, some fruit and two large bottles of water. I also buy a hot-water bottle, which Helena had recommended for the pain, and settle myself in to my new home for the next two days, telling myself that this square, neutral room is a little haven, a place to clear my head and rest.