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 do not believe that is the whole of it. And neither does he.

I think he said it because it was the version of himself he had been building for four years in order not to have to go and knock on a door.

A man who never had children is a sad man. People bring him a drink.

A man who has two of them, and knew, and did nothing for four years, is a different word entirely.

And Soren Vale was not prepared to be that word out loud. Not on television, not to his own board, and not inside his own head at two o'clock in the morning.
PART 5

Oskar and Lilja see their father.

That started in the January. Slowly, with people involved whose job it is, and with four weeks of it in a room with a woman called Oyin.

And it has gone considerably better than any of the four adults expected it to.