Ten years after my husband threw me out in the rain while I was carrying his twins, I watched him tell a television audience that his one regret was never having children.

PART 1

"My biggest regret is that I don't have children."

My ex-husband said that on a television programme on a Thursday evening in November, in a suit that cost more than my first car, with his eyes down and a pause in front of it that he had plainly practised.

My name is Delia Nyman. I am thirty-five.

Soren Vale is thirty-six and he runs Vale Group, which has about eleven hundred people in it and which was four men in a rented office in 2016.

I watched him say that sentence from a sofa with two children asleep against me.

Oskar was on my left with his eyebrows pulled together — the way he has slept since he was about four — like a man working through something difficult.

Lilja was on my right with her face completely open, which is how that child does absolutely everything, awake or asleep.

They have his eyes. Both of them. They have the particular set of his nose, and Oskar does a thing with one side of his mouth that I watched that man do across a table about four hundred times.