“And I thought: she’s ours. And I said yes.”

“You were fifty-six,” I said.

“So were you, weren’t you. When the baby came.”

I didn’t have anything for that.

“Did I do it well?” Roberta said. “No. I did it badly. I’ve had twenty years to work that out and about nine months of a bad heart to work it out faster.

I didn’t want a child. I wanted her not to be with strangers. Those are different things and I did not know that at the time and I do now.”