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.

Are you the man who didn’t want us?

Nobody in that house said anything for about four seconds.

Then Trent Mercer went down on his knees on his mother’s hall floor in front of eleven people, and he said, “Yes.”

I did not expect that and it undid something in me that I had been carrying for eight years and had rather liked carrying.

Marlow said, “Okay,” and came back and took hold of my coat.

That was it. That was the whole exchange. Eight years and the entire reckoning took eleven seconds and was conducted by a person who is three foot ten.

We stayed forty minutes. We did not eat. The children had a drink and looked at a tree and Ike asked to see a photograph of Trent as a boy, which Bobbie Mercer found, and which is the only thing that woman did that day.