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 then never told him she had done it. For seven years.

And she took the risk that there was a child.

Knowingly. At sixty years of age, with a solicitor sitting beside her.

And she said so out loud in a room in a hospice in the August of 2021, to her own son, because she found she could not take it with her.

I told Oskar and Lilja about clause eleven in the June.

Not the gala version. Not the thirty dollars.

The whole of it, at that table, in order. The clinic on the fourth. The office on the fourteenth. The two hundred and forty thousand dollars and the four instalments.

And what I knew when I picked up that woman's pen.

That is the hardest forty minutes I have ever had.

I did it on my own. I did not have anybody in the house and I did not tell either of them beforehand what it was going to be about.