She put down the pencil she’d been drawing with and gave her hand a small smack. You’re not supposed to have thoughts like that, not consciously. Yes, it was true that Pete had been the one pushing for another child, but it wasn’t his fault they’d ended up with two for the price of one.

That was life. It liked to play funny tricks on you. Sometimes they were small pranks. Like when she stayed up until one in the morning finishing her daughter’s school project — she knew she wasn’t supposed to do the work for her, but she also knew that every other parent was probably up late creating the papier-mâché sculptures of the earth too. She knew because she and the other mums joked about it at school pick-up. ‘How did you go with your homework this week?’ Ha ha, wink, wink. But anyway, the next day when she woke up bleary-eyed, her daughter woke with a bad cough and couldn’t go to school, and Mimi realised she could have watched Netflix and drunk wine and gone to bed at eleven.

But other times, it was an extra funny trick. A real zinger. Twins! When your husband convinced you to have just one more baby. That with three children your family will be complete. That it’ll be so much easier this time, because Callie is sixteen and Tara is eight and they’re self-sufficient and they’re great kids and they’ll help out with the baby.

The problem was, Mimi had felt their family was complete. She’d had such an unexpected path to motherhood. As young newlyweds, they’d been completely blindsided by the discovery that Mimi had fallen pregnant with Callie at twenty-two. The pregnancy was smooth, the delivery unexceptional. And then Callie had been a dream baby. She fed well, she slept well. So before long, they figured they may as well have another. It hadn’t been their plan to have children in their early twenties, but why not?

Apparently, the reason why not was Mimi’s uterus, which decided it wasn’t going to be so compliant the second time around. And so, they’d gone through years of heartache trying to fall pregnant. That’s why there was such a huge age gap between their two eldest girls. When Tara had come along, Mimi had felt such a sense of relief. Of contentment. As though for years she’d been trying and failing and trying and failing to do this one simple task: bring Tara into the world. And now that she’d done it she could relax. She could breathe again.