I’m nineteen. I work at a garden center on weekends and I’m doing two classes at the community college while I figure out whether I want the scholarship, which is still there, which they have very kindly extended twice.

Every person who meets me meets a girl who did something at seventeen. My whole personality got printed on a card two years ago and I have to hand it to people at parties.

And I can’t complain about it, because eleven children are alive. That’s the trap. It is a genuinely good thing that happened and it is genuinely the best thing I will ever do and I did it before I could legally vote, and there is no version of complaining about that which doesn’t make me sound like a monster.

So I don’t. So it stays in.

I have told exactly one person all of that.

Not my father. My father would have taken it apart trying to fix it, and then he’d have carried it around for me, because that’s what he does — he takes things off people and carries them and then wonders why he’s tired.