If children are genuinely a strong desire, I'm curious why it isn't something you've done yet.

Not for lack of wanting it. Twice I ran straight at it and the ground gave way, and then I got ill.

Raluca was the real one. Four years together, married in 2015, and I genuinely thought that was the whole rest of my life sorted. Seven months in, the company nearly went under, I disappeared into work to save it, and she went and found someone else. We tried to repair it. We couldn't. I've told you already that trust doesn't come back for me once it's gone, and that's not a principle I chose — it's just what I found out about myself that year.

The second one I'll own more plainly than I did the other night. A woman I'd known two weeks told me she was pregnant, and I married her, because that's what you do. She wasn't pregnant, and she was drinking herself into the ground, and I spent six months looking after her daughter and her animals in a language I didn't speak. That wasn't bad luck. That was me deciding fast on almost no information, and it's the one where I'm the problem in the story.

Married twice, which sounds like a lot until you hear that the second one lasted six months. I've owned furniture longer. Well — I haven't, actually. She took it.

Then epilepsy took the next couple of years outright, and by the time that settled I was thirty-eight and had stopped looking. Not out of principle. I just wasn't going to sign up for something with no butterflies in it, and nothing turned up.

The honest version of what it feels like: I was in California this year watching my brother and my sister with their kids, and it was wonderful and it was hard at the same time, in about equal measure. I've wanted this a long time. I've just been bad at getting there.