And also: I am not sure I wanted it with him.

I have had to sit with that.

In the last three of those years, some part of me was aware that I was trying to have a child with a man who had begun to describe me, in company, as somebody who kept receipts.

I do not know what that part of me was doing.

I am not superstitious and I do not believe a body knows things.

But I know that when the third round failed, underneath the grief, there was a thing I could not look at directly for four years, and when I finally looked at it, it was relief.