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.

And then he came down off that stage.

Not fast. Not at a run. Nobody stopped him and nobody from his own company moved.

He came down the way you walk toward something you are frightened of.

He put the microphone down on the lectern, which I thought at the time was a strange thing to be capable of doing, and came down four steps and across that floor.

He stopped about six feet short of my children and did not come any closer.

And he said: "How old are you?"

And Lilja said: "Ten."

Completely level. She has told me since that she was not frightened at any point, which I believe, and which is the only thing about that entire evening that genuinely surprised me.

And Soren Vale went down onto one knee on a ballroom floor, in a dinner jacket, in front of four hundred people.

And he did not say anything at all for about forty seconds.