‘Contraception?’

‘Yes, the pill.’

‘Any trouble taking it regularly?’

‘No. Like clockwork. Reminders in my phone.’

‘Have you been physically sick? Gastro? Food poisoning?’

I told him that I had eaten some old leftovers from the fridge that I shouldn’t have. ‘Biryani,’ I said, and then I’d laughed at this extraneous detail but Dr Honeycott had just waited for details that he could actually work with. He was making me nervous. He’d never made me nervous before. ‘Um . . . I can’t remember when exactly – a while ago. It was a few days old. I did not respond well. Both ends.’ Funny. Oh, I was so funny.

Dr Honeycott’s eyebrows went up, but still he didn’t smile. ‘You didn’t take the morning-after pill?’

‘No, I didn’t even think of it. Neither did Nassim, might I add.’

‘How is Nassim? Is that going well?’

‘Very well, thank you. Yes, he’s great.’

Dr Honeycott considered me for a moment before delivering, matter-of-factly, a little bit of wisdom. ‘The biryani does seem like the likely culprit re contraception, but it is always worth remembering that pregnancy is the natural consequence of sex. From a biological perspective, that’s what sex is for.’

A flush of adrenaline ran through my body. I said I assumed he explained that to the young men who came to visit him too.

And he’d smiled then. I’d never seen that smile on my doctor’s face before. It was such a nasty, smug little smile. ‘Boys don’t get pregnant,’ he’d said. He was talking like sex with Nassim was something I should have stopped. Like it was up to me to separate it out from our relationship, up to me to have control over this sort of thing. I thought this, but then I caught myself – I was being stupid. He couldn’t have meant that. And as I began, laughingly, to point out that boys actually make pregnancies, he spoke over the top of me. ‘You always were lively, Anna. I’m guessing you didn’t use condoms then either?’ And then he sighed, as though this was all a bit much.

I felt gross. I was being chastised. That’s what was going on. This man was chastising me, like I was a naughty schoolgirl.

‘So how soon can we do something about this?’ I said, trying to move on. And then he swivelled in his chair to fully face me.

‘Are you sure that’s what you want, Anna?’

Are you sure that’s what you want? That’s what he said. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I told him I had a standard health issue with a standard treatment that I would like him to implement, but he just sat back and looked at me for a long while before he started speaking. He talked like he was reminiscing about the good old days as he explained to me that until only very recently abortion had been illegal in this state. To refer me, he said, he would have needed to hold the belief that termination of my pregnancy was necessary to protect me from serious danger to my life or health. A criterion that would have been, in his opinion, unmet. ‘I think you should know,’ he said, ‘that had the legislation not changed, I would have refused your request for a termination.’