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One way or the other, she had to know.

Pushing out of the pharmacy, Helen strode back to her bike, trying to ignore the rising wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm.

On the short drive over, she had twice felt she might be sick, ripping up her visor in case of emergency, just about making it to Superdrug unscathed.

Her emotions were in a riot, her mind reeling, as a flurry of troubling questions besieged her.

Was it just nerves? Was she ill? Or was there a more basic, more troubling reason for her discomfort?

It had been over thirty years since she’d last bought a pregnancy test and Helen felt a fraud surveying the family planning section.

This area was usually the preserve of anxious teens or hopeful thirty-somethings, not fifty-something ex-coppers who were slowly going out of their mind with worry.

She felt ill at ease, a fake, and yet she had never been a coward, so after selecting two of the most expensive, most reputable, tests she hurried to the checkout.

She kept her helmet on throughout, hoping that in doing so she might disguise her age, yet still detected an inkling of curiosity from the checkout girl as their eyes met.

Helen left as decisively as she’d arrived and was soon back on the roads, racing home.

The familiar sights and sounds seemed to pass in a blur, driving on autopilot, barely registering her surroundings.

She felt as if she was in a dream, a strange darkening fantasy which she might awake from at any minute, breathless, startled but relieved.

But the minutes passed with no release and before long she was pulling into the underground car park beneath her building, bringing her Kawasaki to a halt in the usual bay.

Cursing the fact that the lift was out of order, Helen made her way to the towering stairwell.

Gripped by nausea and unsteady on her feet, she nevertheless took the stairs at speed.

Each second of delay now felt like agony.

She wanted to do the test, find out it was negative, then spend the evening berating herself for being so foolish.

Even if that wasn’t the case, if she was somehow pregnant, more than anything she just wanted to know.

Eventually she crested the top-floor landing, heading fast for the front door.

As she did so, her phone pinged loudly in her hand.

Looking down, Helen clocked that she’d received a text from Harika Guli, the manager of the Kurdish Welfare Centre, asking if she’d made any progress in her search for Selima.

Ignoring the message, she shoved the phone back into her pocket, before pushing inside the flat, slamming the door shut behind her.

Helen wasted no time in heading to the bathroom.

Only now did she pause, seating herself tentatively on the loo seat, her heart hammering in her chest. Did she really want to do this?

Summoning her courage, Helen ripped open the packet, removing the contents and took the test. To her it was as if nothing and nowhere existed apart from this small room, which even now seemed to fill with a tense, expectant hush.

She barely dared to look down at the results, fearful of what she might discover, but glancing at the applicator, she saw that she had an answer.

She stared at the clear blue line, feverishly checking the box once more to ensure she wasn’t mistaken, but there was no doubt.

The test confirmed that she was pregnant.

Tossing the applicator into the bin, she swiftly ripped open the second test, determined that this time the correct result would be delivered, the only result she could countenance.

But moments later, her fragile hopes were dashed, the second test confirming the initial result.

Helen was carrying a child.