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.

It worked. That is the thing nobody says about this sort of plan. It worked perfectly and it took about eleven seconds.

It has been eleven weeks.

Eudora Vail is living at my house now. That is not a sentence I expected to type.

She came in the second week of January.

She is in the back bedroom, the one that gets the morning. There are two carers on a rotation and something being arranged for the nights from about the fourth week.

She has about three months. Possibly less. Nobody will put a number on it and I have stopped asking for one.

That was Nia’s idea.

She is eight years old and she asked me in a car, in a car park, about four days after Christmas.

Why can’t Grandma come to our house?

And I sat there with the engine off and could not produce one single argument. Not one, and I am a woman who can produce four arguments about anything.