SIDE BY SIDE

Heading out of the hospital, I was on cloud nine as I pulled my phone out of my pocket.

‘You’re not on top of a roof, are you?’ I said, when my partner Stephen, 50, who was at work as a roofer, picked up. ‘You’ll want to be sitting down.’

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘We’re having twins,’ I said.

‘You’re joking,’ he laughed.

‘I swear, it’s true,’ I said.

We’d only had a positive pregnancy test a couple of weeks before.

I wonder if it’ll be twins, I thought to myself.

It wouldn’t normally be the first thought when finding out you’re pregnant. But I had an identical twin sister, Elizabeth, and Stephen had a non-identical twin