‘I thought he was going to kill you,’ Heather said.

‘Nah.’ Another sip. ‘He just likes the drama.’

‘But he was strangling you. He said he would kill you.’

Mum held out the bottle to Heather. She took it.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, after Heather took a sip. ‘He’s too fucking chicken.’

But, as it turned out, Mum was wrong.

Since that day, drinking in the bathroom had helped Heather to deal with many things. For example, the baby thing.

She and Stephen had had the discussion the first morning she woke up in Stephen’s bed.

‘I have a tricky subject I’d like to bring up and I think it would be pertinent to bring it up sooner rather than later,’ he’d said.

It was one of the things she loved about him: his forthrightness, his refusal to shy away from difficult discussions. Also, his casual use of words like ‘pertinent’.

‘The fact is, I’m at quite a different life stage from you. As such, I feel it would be irresponsible of me to proceed with you any further – and, to be clear, I very much want to proceed further – without making you aware that I am not interested in having any more children.’

It wasn’t a surprise. Heather understood there weren’t many men in their sixties with adult children who wanted more kids. Some might be willing to go there for the sake of the relationship – but no one wanted it. And it was fine with Heather. Or if not fine, at least it didn’t injure her the way it might have injured a different, more maternal sort of woman. For Heather, it was primarily something she felt intellectually rather than physically or biologically.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

It was such a middle-class question. People her age spent so much time musing on it. What do I want? What do I want? Heather didn’t bother. After all, it didn’t matter what she wanted. Life happened; you didn’t get to choose it. And sure enough, it had just happened to her again. ‘I want to be with you.’

Stephen accepted that at face value. He didn’t press her on whether she had ever wanted children, or whether this would be a sacrifice. He didn’t want to know and she didn’t want to tell him. She just needed to reframe, that was all. People reframed all the time. People who realised they weren’t going to live a long life. People who lost a loved one, suffered an accident, lost use of a limb. They reframed. And Heather would too. No babies for her. They wouldn’t be part of her journey.

She heard the rumbling of the garage door opening. Stephen was home. She downed the rest of her whisky, left the glass on the counter, and turned on the shower. She’d just stepped out of her clothes and into the stream of water when there was a knock at the door. ‘May I come in?’

Stephen was always wonderfully respectful like that. They hadn’t reached that point in the relationship where they barged into the bathroom when the other was in there demanding to know where the car keys had been left. Heather felt an unexpected pang of yearning to reach that point with Stephen.