‘Are we crazy for doing this?’ she asked.

I took her hand and kissed it, turning the pale skin over and running my fingers along the faint veins of her arm.

‘This is what you wanted. This is what we both wanted.’

‘And it’s wonderful,’ she said, ‘but it’s so much, so fast.’

I could see the worry on her face. She wore it like a veil.

‘What are we really talking about here?’ I asked.

She lifted the magazine and pointed to the fourth life event: pregnancy.

‘Let’s hold fire on that one.’

But she took my hand and placed it on her belly. ‘That ship may have already sailed.’

‘You’ve done a test?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer. I knew her. I knew that if I went to the study and opened her laptop I’d find exhaustive searches for the best brands available. That she would have snuck out early to purchase them, interrogating the pharmacist before returning home to confirm her suspicions in private.

‘Can I see it?’ I asked.

We went into the en-suite and she handed me the little piece of plastic. I sat on the lip of the bathtub and stared at it in silence.

‘You’re pregnant?’ I said, almost incredulous. She stood in the doorway and nodded slowly, her eyes welling with tears. ‘You’re pregnant,’ I said again, and then I rose and hugged her. I kissed the skin of her neck and we held each other in silence.

‘You’re pregnant!’ I roared, lifting her up and forcing a giggle out of her.

That night we walked together beneath the stars, which, like the child, seemed so unnervingly close and yet so impossibly beautiful. And with each footfall the enormity of the obligation seemed to dawn on me.

Beneath the milk white of the moon I thought back to my own childhood. To my parents’ arguments over mortgage payments and tuition, schedules and social functions. To my father, who had taken on the form of a poltergeist in our young lives, leaving early for work and appearing late at night to upset furniture and dishes while we slept. To the din of worry that seemed to play out so unrelentingly.

And later, beneath the sheets, with the boxes piled all round us, I had relayed all of my fears to her. I had left them naked and bare at her doorstep like an infant. And she had chased each of them away in turn.

I felt then as though I would be happy to remain with her forever. Her legs swimming beneath the sheets, intertwined with mine. The warmth radiating off her.

But it’s difficult now, all of these years later, not to appreciate the bitter irony of our situation. We had built a life around the child, but now the child was gone. Like the apartments we once inhabited the thought of life before him feels alien, like a memory borrowed from a stranger. He is woven into the fabric of our shared existence that his death has rendered our life counterfeit. Without him, I wonder, what remains of us? Of our life together?