Ella Harper - Pieces of You.

I snorted. Fairy parts? For such an extrovert, Dee could be surprisingly prudish when it came to sex talk. I felt a sticky hand on my arm.

‘What’s bum cleavage?’ Frankie’s brow wrinkled. She wore a tiara at a rakish angle, giving her the air of an off-duty princess. ‘And fairy parts?’

Dee looked vexed. ‘Franks, you do have the most incredible timing. Can’t you ever appear when I’m talking about school schedules?’

‘You don’t talk about school sched … whatever you said,’ Frankie responded with the brutal honesty of a three-year-old.

‘Are you wearing sun cream?’ Dee fretted, expertly checking Frankie’s shoulders for redness. ‘And where’s your hat?’

‘It’s gone.’ Frankie’s expression darkened. ‘Not talking about it.’ Ignoring her mother’s look of agitation, she turned to me. ‘Where’s Uncle Luke?’

Where indeed? I checked my watch. ‘He’s working, sweetheart, but he promised me he’d be here for your Swingball championship.’

Frankie looked unimpressed. ‘When I grow up, I’m not going to work at all. I’m going to be just like mummy.’

‘Charming.’ Dee took a long, exasperated sip of sangria.

I hid a smile. ‘Mummy does work, Franks. She works hard bringing up the three of you.’

I frowned. What was that? I had felt an odd sensation in my stomach. This pregnancy was scaring the hell out of me. I’d had a few strange twinges in my groin over the past few days, and was concentrating hard on not worrying about them.

‘We’re not work , Auntie Lucy.’ Frankie shot her mother a withering look. ‘We’re just children .’ Catching sight of her brother and sister terrorising a neighbour’s child, she tore after them.

‘Just children,’ Dee echoed faintly. ‘If only. I’d be amused if I thought she was joking.’

I watched Dee’s three children charging down the garden, bellowing and galloping like wild animals. Somehow, Dee and Dan had managed to divide their gene pool equally, giving Jack, their only son, Dee’s height, blonde curls and clear blue eyes. Tilly, their second child, had Dan’s expressive features, his unruly dark hair and the heavy-set jaw more suited to a man than a young girl. And Frankie, the child they hadn’t planned, had inherited a rather exotic blend of them both, giving her dirty-blonde curls and heavy brows that Dee was already itching to wax.

Was our baby a boy? Would he be like Jack, boisterously confident, destroying everything in his path? Or perhaps a girl like Tilly – thoughtful and creative, but still prone to bouts of excitable shrieking and yodelling? Maybe we’d have one of those 4D scans everyone seemed to be having these days, the ones Dee said made babies looked like freaky little aliens with webbed fingers.

‘They’re so very loud ,’ Dee continued, clutching her hair. ‘They actually make my brain rattle sometimes.’

I felt something familiar struggling to break free and I squashed it down, hard. It wasn’t just Dee’s languid charm I envied. Her life seemed so perfect, so complete. The house, the garden, the fact that she and Dan were entirely suited – no, that wasn’t it, because so were Luke and I. But the children . I closed my eyes briefly. If only I could be blessed with half … a third , of Dee’s luck. Easy conceptions, smooth pregnancies, no major heartaches along the way.

I need to be clear about this: I loathed myself for the acrid ripples of jealousy that often poleaxed me without warning. Dee was my best friend and she had been supportive, sympathetic and downright heroic during the endless miscarriages and the ensuing heartache.

But somehow, Dee’s ripe fertility left the stench of failure all over me. Two major events had rocked our friendship. The first had been the time Dee had admitted that she and Dan were pregnant again, by accident. Frankie’s unexpected arrival had caused a new kind of grief. The choking kind that left a ball of spiky thistle in the back of my throat. An accidental baby? One that hadn’t required temperature-taking, vitamins, injections or side effects? Dee’s apologetic hug when she’d told me had almost tipped me over the edge and we had clung to one another wordlessly. What was there to say?

The second event had been more recent, the time Dee had cautiously suggested that I consider ‘letting go’ of my baby dreams. My fingers involuntarily curled around my glass of sangria at the memory, those feelings clawing at me again. Ferocious rage, screaming frustration and an urge to strike Dee had been so violently strong that I had been forced to stalk away at high speed. We hadn’t spoken for a month and I had grieved for our friendship, certain we would never speak again. Dee had left countless pleading messages on my mobile, followed by some drunken ones accompanied by tuneless singing to the soundtrack of that old TV show The Golden Girls – we used to watch it constantly after nights out back in the day – and after the fifteenth rendition of ‘Thank you for being a frrriiieeend,’ I had finally relented. I knew deep down that Dee had suggested giving up on our baby dreams because she cared. To underline the hideousness of the whole sorry episode, we had lost our second IVF baby shortly afterwards, and Dee had been almost as devastated as we had been.

Dee interrupted my reverie. ‘Let’s go and join Dan at the barbecue; he’s looking forlorn.’ We strolled towards the patio together.

‘Good lord, who’s that?’ Dee said, waving to someone.

‘Haven’t a clue. Did Dan invite him? Nell looks gorgeous, doesn’t she?’

She did. Luke’s sister was naturally stylish with bobbed hair, the same chestnut-brown shade as Luke’s. She was wearing what looked like one of her own creations, a stylish tea dress with an unusual hemline. The print was bold, but it suited her.

‘That’s Nell’s friend Lisa,’ I informed Dee, ‘from school, I think. She owns about five clothes shops already. She’s the archetypal business woman.’

‘Wow. Five shops. That’s so cool.’

Dee always admired other women who ran businesses. I had a suspicion she might harbour secret dreams of becoming the next female Richard Branson, if only she could find a slot in her children’s busy social schedules.

‘That guy she’s being chatted up by is cute,’ Dee said. ‘Her type? … Oh, no, maybe not.’

Watching Nell politely brush the guy off, we waited for her to join us. ‘Hey,’ Nell said warmly. ‘What a perfect day for a barbecue.’

‘It’s too bloody hot,’ Dee grumbled, wiping her brow. ‘This is what the menopause will be—’

‘Ignore her; she gets crabby in the heat.’ I turned to Nell. We really needed to get our friendship back on track – somehow we’d drifted lately. ‘Listen, do you fancy coming over for coffee tomorrow morning?’ I intended to hide behind the kitchen counter and distract Nell with some bad cooking. Sweltering in the heat, I pulled my cardigan round my tummy to disguise the swell.

Nell seemed pleased. ‘That sounds great. Oh dear, look at mum. She’s being chatted up by a man with a beard. She has a thing about beards. And not in a good way.’

‘Who does?’ Dee shuddered and waved Nell away. ‘Go, rescue her.’

I put a hand on my stomach. There it was again. A tiny flutter inside. Like butterfly wings beating. It was the baby, it was moving. It was too early, surely? I gasped, turning away from Dee. The baby was stretching its limbs, wriggling, kicking. Relief coursed through me. There was nothing wrong. Everything was fine. My baby was growing and moving and it felt magical.

‘Are you all right, Dan?’ Dee frowned as Dan started frantically poking the sausages. They looked cremated.