‘Yes. My fourteen-year-old daughter tells me all I need to know about the world outside. I live my life vicariously through her.’ Edie stares wistfully into the middle distance as she considers her lot. ‘Any idea how long it’s been going on?’

‘I didn’t ask for specifics, but for quite some time, I think. Certainly during our last two IVF attempts. That’s when Jake started working late and going out for a drink with “colleagues” every Friday night.’ His most overused phrase was ‘I’ll just have one and then I’ll be straight home.’ That ‘one’ seemed to last him about four hours. But then again, he never specified what that ‘one’ was. I’d assumed it was a bottle of overpriced beer. If I’d realised the ‘one’ was a furtive knee-trembler with his new girlfriend, then I wouldn’t have watched the clock so anxiously waiting for his return.

‘What a bastard,’ Edie says. ‘And to think I always liked Jake, despite what Mum thinks of him.’

‘I quite liked him too,’ I say with a heavy-hearted huff. ‘I can’t believe that when I was preciously hoarding up eggs like the Easter Bunny, he was out there splashing his sperm around willy-nilly.’

‘No wonder his sperm-count was low if he was sharing them out between two women.’

My face crumples.

‘Oh sorry.’ Edie tops up my glass and puts her arm round me. ‘Drink more,’ she advises. ‘It’ll help you to forget.’

Drinking more usually helped Edie to get pregnant again, but she seems to have forgotten.

This is an awful situation and I can’t tell Edie that it isn’t entirely Jake’s fault. Jake’s not entirely wrong, somewhere in all this I have to shoulder some of the blame too. I sink back into the cushions and close my eyes. I wish this sofa would eat me whole so that I would never have to deal with anything ever again. But as hard as I wish, the sofa just won’t oblige.

I try to think back to guilt-free days. It’s a long time ago. Since then, I’ve had to face this head-on. Every day. Some days it’s so far in the background that it doesn’t hurt at all. On other days it’s right at the front of my brain, bashing against the inside of my skull like some demented cuckoo trying to head-butt its way out of a clock. I can’t come clean. Not after all this time. Jake has poked a finger into my dark, dark secret. He has prised up the corner and now I feel I can never stick it back down again. Everyone has dark secrets. Show me someone who says they haven’t got a skeleton or two in their cupboards and I’ll show you a natural blond over the age of thirty.