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health visitor had asked the same question after going through a questionnaire with her when Emme had been a week old. ‘What are your feelings about the way the birth went?’ A neat blonde woman with a bouncy stride, she read the questions from a clipboard, intended to check for post-natal depression, though she never said so, and Fran had answered everything with determined cheerfulness. ‘Yes, yes. Fine.’
    And unless they meant, are you having sex again yet, it was fine, wasn’t it? She couldn’t imagine having the conversation with anyone but Jo, but Jo didn’t come, she sent an expensive dress with a card tucked into the tissue paper: Congratulations!! Two exclamation marks, which was so not Jo it was as if she’d been made to write it at gunpoint and was sending a covert message. Love, Jo. X .
    Her mind wandered, late at night, on the brink of sleep, or sometimes if they were watching some movie or other, it didn’t even have to be a sex scene though the first time it happened that was what it was. A man kneeling in front of a woman was all it took, her hands on his shoulders, stroking his neck, his face turning up to look into hers and Fran had to close her eyes a second, so vivid was it, so sudden. A hotel bedroom with a long window open, rain outside on a dark lake and the exact feel of Nick’s hair between her fingers. Hearing the pleasure sound, some explicit gasp from the box, Nathan had glanced up at the television screen from his laptop then back down while Fran had just kept still, the heat rising at her neck.
    Then there’d been a night when she reached for him in the dark where he lay with his back turned to her; sliding an arm across she felt the muscle of his belly go taut. His hand had come up quickly and taken hers, holding it still. He had murmured something like a warning and when she understood she had pulled the hand back and lain flat, her heart thumping.
    ‘Let’s go shopping,’ she said to Jo on the phone, trying for cheerful. ‘Nothing fits at the moment.’
    She’d thought, when they were alone together, squeezed into a changing room on Jo’s lunchbreak and laughing at some terrible outfit, it would come naturally. It would be like old times. But with Emme parked in the corner gazing at the bright lights and Fran frowning down at her little soft roll of belly and at the buttons on a pale, soft, perfect, beautiful silk shirt that, besides being dry-clean only, wouldn’t do up over her chest, she couldn’t quite come up with the right words, somehow.
    Jo caught her looking down at herself, and cleared her throat. ‘Fran,’ she said, wary.
    Fran hadn’t been bothered by the belly, those first weeks and months, it was part of the deal. Then one evening she’d been reaching up for something in the kitchen and her shirt had come untethered from her jeans and there’d been something behind her, a sound, from Nathan, and she’d had to sit back down, tugging at herself. Although when she looked up he was only smiling. Loving.
    ‘Fran,’ said Jo. ‘Look. Is everything all right?’ And at the reluctance in her voice Fran had to look away, grabbing her trousers from the floor. She was going to be asked something she didn’t want to answer, or told something she didn’t want to hear.
    ‘All right?’ she said, dressed and decent again. ‘Oh yes,’ and then, stupidly bright, ‘It’s been so lovely, doing this, even if … well, the weight’ll come off, I just have to relax. It’s been just like old times.’
    She geared herself up to talk about it. But he watched her so closely, he knew her inside out, and hanging up his jacket when he came in from work he seemed to know what she was going to say even before she finished the sentence. ‘We need to…’ she began. And suddenly he was there, right up against her, Emme between them, her small downy head turning, eyes looking unblinking from one of them to the other. He stroked Fran’s hair.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.