And the photograph on the bookshelf, which I mentioned to Seren on the phone as though it were obvious and which requires an explanation.
It has been there since 2014. It is Dominic at twenty-eight, on a beach, holding two babies in one of those double slings, looking knackered and delighted.
Ivy asked me once, in about 2018, why on earth I kept it up.
And I gave her the answer I had ready, which was that they were entitled to know what he looked like.
That is true and it is not the whole of it.
The other part — which took until this year to be able to say — is that I wanted them to see, every day, that he had once been that. That there had been a man on a beach with two babies strapped to him, and that he had chosen, later, to stop being him.
I told myself I was giving them their father.
