I knew that people would talk, that they would call me exactly the ugly names his children would later call me to my face.

But I weighed all of that against my son’s life, and it was not, in the end, a close contest.

A mother who has stood in a bright corridor holding an estimate she cannot pay will do a great many things she never imagined, and marrying a kind dying man so that her child can live is not the worst of them.

It may even be one of the better ones.