I knew as soon as I heard her call my name sharply from the direction of the bathroom. "Mark!" said it all. It was by no means the first time that someone has called me by my name, of course. It is not the first time that there had been some urgency behind that call. In fact, if I hadn't known better, I would have thought that I was in trouble again. ("Mark! Did you let the dogs in the house while their paws were still muddy?" or "Mark! Didn't I ask you not to leave your socks and underwear in the middle of the floor?") But this time, I did know better.

She had not gone off to the bathroom in order to find fault with my dog-sitting or housekeeping, but rather she had gone in to take a pregnancy test. (I was glad that she was so distracted, because I had actually used some carefully placed dirty socks to cover up the dog's muddy tracks).

For some couples struggling to conceive, taking such a test is a monthly ritual, but not for us. In four years of trying, we have taken a total of three. We just never got that close. Never had we made it to TCOYF's magic DAY 17 of high temperatures (dpo), the Holy Grail of couples looking for pregnancy symptoms. In fact, we never got much past Day 12, and Charlotte's cycle is as reliable as the rising and setting of the sun. In all those years, we had never had any doubt that she was not pregnant. Until that moment.

When I heard, "Mark!," I knew. Those four letters sounded different coming out of her mouth. They sounded different when they leapt into my ears and crawled right to the center of my brain. It was a word that I know as well as my own – well, it is my own name, and yet it was as if I had never heard it before. My heart skipped a beat or two. (It might have been three, because I did get dizzy.)

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