Jake’s right. I’ve been lying to him. But perhaps I’ve been lying to myself even more. At the beginning of our IVF marathon, I paid privately for an appointment with the consultant without telling Jake. The result was that he confirmed that I was damaged inside. I have scarred Fallopian tubes. Horribly scarred. And I know how they got like that. I didn’t tell Jake. I didn’t want Jake to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. I still don’t.

‘Mum’s worried about you,’ Edie says.

I’m sure Mum is worried about me, but only up to a point. My mother worries about herself an awful lot more. She’s always been more concerned about herself and her life than either me or Edie. When Edie was pregnant—for the first time—my mother took to her bed for days on end, wailing and moaning about what the neighbours would think and what terrible daughters we were. We were both teenagers—frightened teenagers. Edie because she was pregnant and had no idea what to do. Me because I could tell that it was falling to me to look after my sister, as I always had. When we’ve needed my mother, she’s never been there. She has steel-grey hair and steel-grey eyes, but her nerves are made of a completely different substance. She has a voice that can reduce bank managers and checkout assistants to tears, but crumbles the minute there’s a hint of a crisis in her own world. We can’t depend on my mother, she depends on us.

I look at the toys scattered on Edie’s lounge floor, the stack of children’s videos by the telly and I wonder what my lounge would have looked like if I’d had a child. And the most terrible thing about all this is that I had my chance and I blew it. I blew it in the biggest way imaginable. No one knows this. Not Edie. Not my mother. Not Jake.

We’d all only just recovered from the shock of Edie’s first pregnancy when she was at it again. She was eighteen and I was in my final year at university. My mother went ballistic, took to her bed with another attack of the vapours and insisted that this time Edie and Lee ‘do the right thing’ and get married. In the run-up to my finals, I came home, sorted my mother out, sorted Edie out, sorted the wedding out and when that was all over, went back to university and sorted myself out.