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.

Four. It is in print. He had had it for six weeks.

He could not ask me. A man who called a woman a liar in a kitchen in 2017 cannot send a message in 2025 that says how many are there.

So he sent an invitation to Christmas dinner, and he let his mother arrange it, and his mother arranged it the way she arranges everything, which is as an occasion at which somebody is going to be shown their place.

He wanted me in that house so he could look at me and work it out.

And Marlow, who is eight and who had heard exactly what I had told them all when they were six and had asked, which is that their father had not believed I was expecting and had chosen to go, stepped forward in a hallway and asked him the question directly.