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 in eleven years I had never once said it out loud to one single human being on this earth.

Not to a friend. Not to a counsellor. Not to my own mother, who died in 2020 believing the thirty dollars.

He told eleven million people he had no children.

And I let two children grow up without a father, in the sense that actually mattered.

Because I never once said the sentence.

Your grandmother put something in front of me. And I took it. And I did not tell one person in that room that I was carrying you.

That is not the same size.

I know it is not the same size. Four people have told me so and all four of them are right.

But it came out of the same drawer.

And the only person in the whole of this who has ever said a difficult thing out loud, at the first opportunity, to the person it was actually about —