I stood in front of the mirror, examined myself and found myself wanting. I weighed myself and realized I was shrinking. I boiled myself an egg, broke open the top, then dabbed my spoon into the yellow yolk. I made myself eat half of it before I felt so sick I had to stop. I had stomach cramps, a grim, familiar backache, so I ran a bath and lowered myself into it, hearing the phone ring. I couldn’t bear to answer it and heard Mary’s voice saying into the answering machine that poor little Robin was running a fever, she’d be around as soon as she could. I lay in the hot water and closed my eyes. Then I opened them and watched a curl of red blood run out of me and spread, then another.

So.

It wasn’t to be, after all. Once again, as with all the other months of trying and hoping and praying, I wasn’t pregnant, and Greg had died in his car with another woman and left me alone, and what on earth was I going to do now?

Chapter Four

It was drizzling. Gwen and Mary arrived early, when I was still in my dressing-gown trying to decide what to wear. The pair of them were dressed in almost identical clothes, and I could see they’d been aiming for the casual but smart, sober but not somber look I was intending for myself. Mary had brought some Danish pastries, which were warm and sticky in their paper bag, and I made us a big pot of coffee. We sat around the kitchen table, dunking the pastries, and I was reminded of when we were students together, sitting just like this in the kitchen of the house we’d shared together in our final year.

“I’m so glad the two of you could be here,” I said. “It means a lot.”

“What did you think?” said Mary, heatedly. Her face was flushed with excitement. “That we would let you go through this alone?”

I thought I might cry at that, but I didn’t, although grief felt rather like a fishbone that was gradually working itself loose in my throat. I asked Mary how her son was and she replied in a constrained, self-conscious way, very different from the eager assumption she had made in the past that I would be interested in every belch and gurgle he made. I had crossed into a different country. No one felt able to have an ordinary conversation with me, no one was about to tell me their petty anxieties and daily fears in the way they would have done a week ago.