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 was twenty-four, and frightened, and eleven weeks pregnant in a rented room.

And I did the arithmetic.

I took the money.

Four instalments. Sixty thousand dollars each. The last one landed in the June of 2016, two days after those two turned one.

I did not spend it. That part matters to me, and I am perfectly aware of how much I want it to matter.

It went into an account on the fourth of December, 2014, and I did not touch one dollar of it for four years and four months.

Not through the pregnancy. Not in the flat above the shop. Not on either of the hospital nights.

I worked eleven-hour days in a job I could not stand, with two babies in a nursery I could not properly afford, for four years.

On top of two hundred and forty thousand dollars sitting untouched in an account at a branch on Carrow Street that I walked past four times a week.