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

was.

 

They took ten years off me. That is true and I will not be talked out of it.

 

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