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.

In exchange for a full and final release of every claim of any kind arising out of that marriage.

Two hundred and forty thousand dollars.

Not thirty dollars on a wet pavement.

Thirty dollars on a wet pavement is what I have told people for ten years.

I have told it to about forty people. I told it to a woman at a school gate in the February.

It is true. Every single word of it is true and it happened exactly as I have written it down.

It is also about three per cent of what actually went on in the eleven days after it.

And here is the part that I have never said out loud to one living person before this year.

On the day I signed that document, in that office, with his mother sitting four feet away from me —

I knew I was pregnant.

I found out on the fourth of November. I signed on the fourteenth.