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 I had no job, because I had given one up in the March to move into that flat on Fennimore Street.

And there was a woman across a table offering me two hundred and forty thousand dollars.

And I had worked out — somewhere between the clinic on the fourth and that office on the fourteenth, and I am certain it was inside those ten days, because I have thought about the ten days a great deal —

that if I said it, the money stopped.

Not out of malice. Marguerite Vale would not have taken a settlement off a pregnant woman and I do not believe for a second that she would have.

But it would have become something else entirely. Lawyers. A man being told. Years of it.

And at the end of all that I would have had a father for those children, and a maintenance order, and no two hundred and forty thousand dollars in an account.