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.

That she had never been entirely certain, afterward, that there had not been a child.

And that he ought to go and find out.

Four years and three months ago.

And he did nothing with it for four years.

Not a letter. Not a telephone call. Not one approach to one person.

He has told me why. In about an hour, in a hotel bar at midnight after that gala, with both children asleep upstairs in a room Yusuf had booked.

Some of what he said is reasonable. Some of it is not, and I told him so twice.

He had a letter drafted three separate times. I have seen two of them.

And he had an investigator's report in a drawer from the October of 2021 — my address, my employer, and a photograph of a school gate with two five-year-olds in it.

He had that in a drawer for four years and two months.