And I said right, and I put it back in the drawer.
I did not open it. It was not sealed; the flap was tucked in.
And the reason I did not open it, which took until the June of this year to say out loud in a room, is that we were four weeks from starting the first cycle and I had decided — not consciously, but completely — that nothing was going to be allowed to be wrong with either of us until after.
Four years and eight months later a man knelt on a doorstep and told me what was in that envelope.
And the six years, which I have had to look at from inside his head and which has been the hardest part of the whole of it.
Four rounds. Two miscarriages, in the August of 2022 and the May of 2023. Eleven thousand pounds of our own money on top of what was funded.
