Eight years after my husband filed for divorce the week I told him I was pregnant, he texted me an invitation to Christmas dinner at his mother’s house. He expected me to turn up alone. I turned up with four eight-year-olds who have his jaw — and then one of them asked him a question and the room stopped.

I did not send it because I could not work out what I would say to the child afterward, and that is a small and practical reason, and it is the only one I had.

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PART 3 — SIX YEARS

Everybody wants the helicopter part and I am going to give them six years first, because the helicopter is not the story and it took nine minutes.

I had the babies at thirty-one weeks. All four. Nineteen days in a neonatal unit between the four of them and I am not going to write about those nineteen days.

I moved in with my mother’s cousin Odessa Vaile, who is not my mother and had no obligation to me at all, and who took a woman she had met six times and four premature infants into a two-bedroom house and kept us for fourteen months.

There was child support after a court order in 2019 and it was three hundred and eleven dollars a month, which he paid, and which I put in an account and have never spent.