Six years.
And in those six years he did every single thing a man who wants a baby does. He came to the appointments. He held my hand in four waiting rooms. He cried in a car park in 2023.
And underneath it he was a man who had been told that half of his children would have what his grandmother had, and who had decided, in a car outside Thrale in the September of 2019, that the kindest thing he could do was say nothing and hope.
Because for six years nothing happened.
And a man like that will take six years of a wife in pain as a reprieve, and will hold her hand through it, and will not say the sentence, because every month that goes by without a baby is another month in which he does not have to.
And then he bent over a cot on the sixth of October, 2025, and saw a two-millimetre pit on his own daughter's face.
