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.

right, because eight years later, in a kitchen, my father said to me — about Rhys, about the diagnosis, about a boy who had been dead for eight years — he should have gone in sooner.

Before treatment started, he stored samples. Everybody in his position is offered it and most people say yes without thinking about it very hard.

And then, later, when it had gone the way it went, he asked me.

His girlfriend had left in the November. There was nobody else. And they had told him what they tell people when the numbers are what his were.

Leo is not the child of a married man or a man twice my age.

He is my brother’s son.

I was three weeks along when I told them because I knew the exact date of the transfer. It was in a diary.

If I end this, it won’t just be