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.

I did not say it.

I sat in that chair at twenty-four years of age with my hands in my lap.

I let a woman explain a settlement to me for forty minutes and I asked two questions, both of them about dates.

And then I signed on page four, in blue, with her own pen.
PART 4

I have had eleven years to work out why, and I have been round every version of it, and this is the one that survives.

I was twenty-four years old.

I had been put out of a flat in the rain nine days earlier by a man I had been married to for eighteen months and had known for four years.

I had four hundred and eleven dollars in an account.

I had a mother two hundred miles away who I was never going to ring about any of it, for reasons that are hers and mine.