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lunchtime.
    Personal matters were totally public in the cramped offices of Style, where the only privacy to be had was when you locked the door of the tiny toilet and shower cubicle. Everyone who worked in what the interior designer described as a ‘… relaxing contemporary open-plan workspace …” could listen to your most intimate phone calls, could hear you talking to the bank about your overdraft, and knew when you’d forgotten your mother’s birthday.
    What’s more, they were all endlessly curious about shopping, shopaholism being the main qualification necessary for working in a
    women’s magazine. Entire lunch-breaks could be spent oohing and aahing over a sale bargain hat for that wedding or a new baby gro for baby Jessica.
    Jo wanted to keep this latest purchase to herself. A pregnancy testing kit was not the sort of thing you could hold up and scream, “Look what I got for a tenner in Marks and Spencer’s this morning.” Absolutely not.
    It was all so unexpected, such a surprise. Jo was still too stunned to know what she thought about it. She certainly didn’t want the rest of the office to know anything about it until she knew whether she was pregnant or not. Or until she knew how she felt about being pregnant, which was more to the point. God, it was confusing.
    She sighed, jammed the paper bag into her open handbag and closed her eyes briefly. It wasn’t as if she’d had much time to think about being pregnant. She’d only worked out that her period was late when she opened the phone bill that morning.
    Late for work as usual. She was trying to gulp down a cup of coffee while opening her post and sticking folders into her tattered old briefcase when she came upon the phone bill.
    Astronomical, what else? All that time ringing Sligo talking to her mother and the boys. She was about to jam it behind the coffee jar when she stopped herself.
    Write it down, you moron, she muttered, remembering how very irritating it had been to have to pay the phone company a reconnection fee the last time she’d filed a bill behind the coffee and forgotten about it.
    Three pens had to be thrown in the bin before she found one that worked and opened her diary to write, “Pay phone bill’ in the following week. And then she noticed it. Or rather didn’t notice it.
    The capital P which stood for period wasn’t there. Details of her fluctuating bank balance were noted along with appointments for interviews and a green biro squiggle she couldn’t read. But no mention of her period. She flicked through the pages rapidly.
    “Omigod,” Jo muttered.
    “Omigod!” Unless her contact lenses needed to be replaced, she hadn’t
    had a period since the second week in April and it was now the beginning of June.
    She had either stopped menstruating because she was menopausal unlikely at the age of thirty-four or she was pregnant. But it couldn’t be. They always used condoms and spermicide, so how could she be pregnant?
    She’d bought the pregnancy testing kit at the chemist across the road from her apartment, but she was running too late to do the test at home.
    Which was why she was waiting for the right moment to slip nonchalantly into the office loo without catching anyone’s eye. Well, it wasn’t the sort of news to broadcast to your colleagues when your brain was still reeling from the shock and your boyfriend was still blissfully unaware of impending fatherhood.
    She thought of Richard: clever, witty, good-looking in a boyish way, a talented photographer and an inveterate charmer of women. Of all the words you could use to describe her boyfriend of the last two years, fatherly would have been last on her list. Well, maybe conventional would be last on the list but fatherly wouldn’t be far behind.
    Three years older than she was, he looked as if he was heading towards thirty, never mind forty, and thought that settling down was something other people did when they were ten years older than he was.
    The thought of