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When Ali Knight went out on her first date with Stephen, she had no idea that within a year they would be parents ... Was it all too much, too soon? I met Stephen in a sandwich shop on a rainy August lunchtime. He was in the queue behind me. "Don't I know you?" he asked. The Italian man making my lunch raised an eyebrow and gave me a look. "I don't think so." "I'm sure I've met you before." I stared. He had nice brown eyes and obviously didn't care that a line of office workers were gawping at him. I shook my head and smiled an apology, but it turned out I was wrong. As we walked out of the shop, swinging our sandwiches in their paper bags, I realised we had once met at a party a few years before, had some mutual friends and our offices were in the same street. We talked vaguely about having lunch sometime and went our separate ways. If someone had told me then that less than a year later he would be sat by my bed in the maternity ward, cradling our newborn son, I would have bet my life on it being a lie. A month later, we did go for that lunch. The holidays were over – in more ways than one. The attack on the twin towers had happened only weeks before, and our meal was tinged with grand themes: we talked about nuclear Armageddon as we chomped through fish. We flirted. We drank. We started going out. Two months later, I had to take the morning-after pill. It didn't work. Four weeks later, I was pregnant. I took the test a day before going home for Christmas with my parents. I cried alone in my bathroom, the shock a great wave moving over me. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew then that whatever happened, great changes were upon me – upon us. I was at a fork in the road. I was 35, I had a good job and a flat, and while I had always imagined that I would have kids one day, I was a planner – I never imagined pregnancy would ambush me in this way. Stephen was on holiday in Costa Rica. We had had fun times together: we'd been to the Chinese state circus, a Young British Artists opening, a weekend in Scotland and some parties and pubs. But they were hardly experiences that could prepare us for having a baby together – could they? As I sat at home with my family that Christmas, I realised that the first, forceful surge of love I felt for this tiny thing inside me could be tempered by thoughts of the grinding struggle of single motherhood. My awe and a kind of fascination that life could outwit my best-laid plans to avoid it began to be outweighed by practical considerations. Whether I kept the baby began to depend on his reaction to the news. He phoned on a crackly and indistinct line from Costa Rica to wish me happy new year. I knew I shouldn't tell him over the phone what had happened, I needed to be near him, to see his reaction to this news, to really understand how he felt, but I couldn't keep it in. He came home early from his holiday, keen to just give it a go. I tried to test him, protesting that we didn't know each other, it was too much of a risk, it had happened too soon. He simply shrugged and quoted Blade Runner: "I don't know how long we'll have together ... Who does?" He didn't overthink it, he lived for the moment and didn't concern himself too much with the future. I was partly struck dumb with terror at the thought of what lay ahead, but also elated. There was something so thrillingly new about it all, life had prevailed against all my plans and we had to work it out as we went along. And deep down it just felt right. A few weeks later, I told my mum, full of trepidation at how she would react. She was shocked but couldn't hide her joy. "If you're happy, I'm happy." She paused. "It's time," she said, and I suddenly realised what she meant. Stephen and I weren't teenagers or fresh out of college. We could give it the best shot we had, and we had better odds than most. The pregnancy changed my relationship with Stephen overnight. We were suddenly fast-tracked into commitment, going from casually meeting twice a week to living in each others' pockets. We had this immense thing binding us together. It would have been normal to feel vulnerable and exposed, to doubt his commitment, but I never did. I felt protected. Love often flourishes when there is some impediment: our situation was unusual, we had bypassed the cat and mouse games that often mar relationships in their early months. There were so many decisions that had to be made: where would we live? Was he going to support me while I was off work? But we didn't think about any of them, we just enjoyed ourselves. Of course it wasn't all light and easy. Dealing with other people's comments was sometimes hard. One night at a party, an acquaintance grabbed me by the elbows. "How did you do it?" I was confused. "Do what?" I asked. "Get him to get you pregnant?" She looked over her shoulder conspiratorially. "I'm going to do the same with my boyfriend." She registered my shock and rolled her eyes. "Come on, don't pretend to me it was an accident." Maybe her reaction wasn't so surprising after all; of course there would be people who didn't believe my version of events. Our mid-30s are a strange time: baby hunger is real, the feeling of running out of time is powerful, cynicism about love's failures and disappointment with the opposite sex is pulsing away under the surface of many people. Stephen was five years younger than me, which was a crucial black mark against me for some of his friends. When he told one of his friends that I was pregnant, he was horrified. "She's stolen your sperm!" he said. "I'd take a look at the legal situation," he added helpfully. The story made me love Stephen all the more – our accident could so easily have had us spinning into acrimony and alienation. Instead, I moved in with him when I was six months pregnant. We chose his flat for no better reason than that it was near a park and I didn't fancy dragging a buggy up the winding, narrow stairs to my place. We had to crowd two homes into one. It was chaos. I had no time to indulge the famed nesting instinct – our baby boy Joseph came a month early, just five days after I'd left work and when I was still trying to clear floor space to move around in. The labour was long, exhausting and difficult, but I still believe I couldn't have done it without him there. I came home five days later in a haze of pain and extreme hormone swings. The euphoria I felt at the hospital was dashed on our first night together at home: we played pass the parcel all night with a squalling, unfamiliar infant, tripping over boxes and packing cases, shell-shocked at what we had done. It was stressful, but perhaps not as stressful as it might have been. Having met only months before, we were liberated from expectation – our own and other people's. We had begun our relationship with a big bump in the road and had to cope with it as best we could. We also had no set routines; there was no way of being for us to mourn once our son came along. Getting pregnant early on was the best thing that ever happened to us. Twenty months later, we did it again – I gave birth to Luke and four years after that to our daughter Isabel. Big events such as birth and death are polarising – they can pull you together or apart, throw you on to a new course and make you abandon the old. It made an accidental – and happy – family of us. • Wink Murder by Ali Knight is out now in paperback, Hodder, £6.99. To order a copy for £5.24, including UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
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