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.

me what I was wearing.

Then she drove eight hours home and she never knocked, and she never told my father she went.

Seven years she has had that, and she gave it to me on a Sunday morning in her own kitchen, about nineteen hours after I turned up.

I asked her why she did not get out of the car.

And she said: because you looked all right, love.

She said it as though it were an answer. And after about four months I worked out that it was one.

She had driven eight hours to find out whether she had ruined my life, and when it turned out she had not, she went home, because the only thing that would have made her knock was me not coping.

She did not come for me. She came for the information.

I have not said that to her and