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.

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.

And there was a long silence and then he said: it’s in the garage.

And I said: I know.

Nobody has moved it yet. It is still in a toolbox in Ohio and I am still eight hours away, and that is where it is going to stay for a few more years, and I find I am all right with that.