My parents threw me out at nineteen because I wouldn’t end my pregnancy. Ten years later I drove back with my son and knocked on the same door and I finally told them who his father was.

years and he could not get past her face to anything behind it, which is the only genuinely tender thing that man did that afternoon.

PART 4

PART 4

Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.

In the May, my brother changed his mind.

He rang me and he was very clear and very calm, which he had not been in months, and he said he wanted them to know.

He wrote them a letter. Four pages, both sides, in a hand that had got worse since February.

And he gave it to me to post, because he could not get to a postbox by then.

I put it in a drawer.

Two weeks.

I was nineteen, five months pregnant, in one room with a shared bathroom, six weeks after being put out of that house by the man that letter was addressed to.