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.

Ten days. I have counted them more times than is good for anybody.

Nobody in that room had the first idea.

It was not on my face. I was eleven weeks and I was not showing in a coat.

And I had not told one single human being on this earth, including my own mother.

And clause eleven does not mention children anywhere.

Because there were no children. Because not one person in that office, apart from the twenty-four-year-old signing it, knew that there were going to be any.

I could have said four words in that room.

I'm pregnant, by the way.

And that document would have gone straight into a bin.

There would have been a different one, drafted by different people, with different clauses in it.

There would have been a man in a room being told something.

There would have been a different eleven years. And there would be two children in this flat tonight who know what their father's voice sounds like at Christmas.