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.

I took two weeks off them, in a room with a shared bathroom, and those two weeks were the only two that were ever going to matter.

If you are holding something because somebody asked you to —

check, every so often, whether they are still the reason.

Because the day it stops being about them and starts being about what it does to somebody else, it is not a promise any more.

It is just a thing you have got that they want.

One last thing.

In the January, Leo asked me whether he could have the letter.

Not to read now. He said: when I’m older. He said it very carefully, the way he says things he has been working up to.

I rang my father. It is the only time I have ever rung him about anything.

I said: Leo wants the letter when he’s older.