My ex-husband invited the former wife he believed was still childless and miserable to his family’s Christmas at their military estate. He never imagined I would arrive on a government tactical helicopter — with four eight-year-olds who had his face.

For one moment he looked irritated. Somebody had come in late and made a noise and he had a thing in progress.

Then he saw it was me.

And something went across that man’s face that I had been waiting eight years to see.

I had pictured it about four hundred times. The real one was faster than the pictured one and it was gone in about a second, and I have thought about that single second considerably more than I expected to.

His eyes went over the uniform. The insignia. The two people walking four feet behind me.

He had not pictured any of that. Not one part of it.

And then he saw the children.

And the colour went out of his face in about two seconds.

He looked at Isaiah. Then Micah. Then Nia. Then Zuri.

Four sets of his own grey eyes looked back at him across about twelve feet of marble.