I click on my list of Bookmarks. My favorite sites, neatly in a row, the only thing I’ve ever organised. First I try her Facebook page, but am greeted by the words “This page isn’t available.” Then her Twitter but am told the page doesn’t exist. Then Instagram, nothing. In a perverse desperation I try Pinterest. Nothing there either.

She has vanished.

Violet has vanished. As I always feared she would.

YVONNE

The sound of my husband slapping his hands against his thighs in time to “We Built This City” makes me want to crash the car and kill us both.

“Simon …” I say. “Could you … could you just not.”

“What?” he replies, grinning. “It’s a classic!”

“Fuck’s sake!” I shout, accelerating through an amber light. “I’ve got a headache.”

The most important day of the month, and yet my mood swings are worse than when I have my period. I read somewhere that irritability during ovulation is down to a heightened sense of competition, as women once fought over the most fertile, masculine mate.

Not much has changed there, really.

The tapping stops, and from the corner of my eye I see Simon slump back in the passenger seat. He’s been drinking, as usual. Sunday lunch with the in-laws, that’s what they should make every hopeful bride sit through for a month before they swish down the aisle in their layers of tulle. That’d put them all off.

Every Sunday the same. Simon’s mum fawning over him, looking me up and down with a judgemental twitch in her eye, asking how he’s been. Has the stress taken its toll, he’s looking a little thin? Must be so hard for him too, you know. Makes him feel … and this last bit is always whispered … less of a man.

Earlier, as I stood in the kitchen, drying the serveware she passed to me unsolicited, I wanted to shout back that he was less of a man. That yes, it was all his fault, actually. All of it, everything, my whole hideous plan. The test results were clear: male factor infertility. His little soldiers were missing their heads and had stumpy tails, and they couldn’t be bothered to swim at all, let alone in the right direction. It was nothing to do with me. My eggs were perfect. Or as perfect as they could be at forty years of age.

Three months of complicated vitamin supplements, a ban on hot baths and tight underwear … Simon has been trying everything to improve his sperm. But I’m not allowed to tell Jane that, of course.

Well, we never had any problems having Simon and Steve. But then I was so much younger …

In the living room her beloved firstborn was sitting next to his father, watching the match on the unsettlingly big television that they were so proud of. Drinking a can of beer. He refused the first two Jane offered, but then his father told him to stop being so soft, that one “wouldn’t hurt.” There’s your answer, Jane. Stop offering him Stella, then you might get your precious grandchild.