Basking in the glow of her once again blissfully happy marriage, and keen to please Jack, Angie had agreed. She’d read that it could take months for her reproductive system to kick back into gear after a long period on the pill and in those days that felt like forever. So, she’d dutifully ditched the little packets of contraceptives that had been part of her life for ten years and forgot all about it, until she missed her period a couple of months later.

She hadn’t told Jack at first. Part of the reason was that she didn’t want to get his hopes up if it was a false alarm, but the other part was that if she was pregnant, she wanted some time to process it before she shared the information. To her, pregnancy symbolised the end of their current way of life and she wasn’t sure that she was ready for that yet. But as she sat on the tube on the way into work and contemplated the possibility, she felt something else too – anticipation. The feeling hit her out of the blue and grew in strength until by the time she got off the train in the city, she was desperate for the test to come back positive.

It was an instinctive feeling, one that overrode any other thoughts, almost visceral. She picked up a couple of tests from the chemist at the train station and locked herself into a toilet cubicle at work, peeing on the first stick and settling in for the ten-minute agonising wait for the result. But within a minute or so she saw the telltale second blue line starting to appear, faintly at first and then growing stronger. She stared at it, feeling something that she hadn’t been expecting, a maternal instinct. Is this what it feels like to be a mother, she thought? This overpowering feeling that I will do whatever it takes to protect this tiny being from harm?

For the rest of the day everything else seemed pointless. The work, the office politics, her friend’s row with her boyfriend that she regaled Angie with over a sandwich at lunch. She felt like she was floating on a cloud, way above the minutiae of everyday life, so that she could see what was happening around her, but she couldn’t feel it anymore. She cherished having that small slice of time to herself for a few hours, when no one else knew their secret but her and the baby. They were in it together, just the two of them, and it was liberating.

But as soon as she left work, her bubble burst and she couldn’t wait to get back home and break the news to Jack, to see the look on his face when he realised that he was going to be a father. The minute she got back to the flat, she presented him with the other, unopened pregnancy test and suggested that they find out together. It was misleading, but she didn’t want him to know that she’d been harbouring this secret all day without him.