My ex-husband invited the former wife he believed was still childless and miserable to his family’s Christmas at their military estate. He never imagined I would arrive on a government tactical helicopter — with four eight-year-olds who had his face.

The authorised flight lifted at about seven and we went north over snow for two hours with the engines going steady.

And sitting along from me were the four people who are the only thing in my life that has ever actually mattered.

Isaiah. Micah. Nia. Zuri.

My eight-year-olds. Two boys and two girls.

Born at thirty-one weeks, four pounds between the smallest and the largest, and eleven days in that unit before anybody would tell me we were out of it.

They were in matching navy winter coats. Polished shoes. And small honorary insignia on the lapels, given to them by people in my unit who love them.

I had those coats made. In the October.

Four weeks before that message arrived.

That is a fact I had completely forgotten until Pell said it to me in the fourth week afterwards, in a car park, without meaning anything by it — and it stopped me dead and I did not drive for about eleven minutes.

Isaiah straightened his little officer’s cap for about the fifth time.

“Mom. Are we really gonna meet Grandpa?”

Nia leaned forward over her belt. “What about Grandma? Is she gonna be there?”

And I looked at four hopeful faces at eight thousand feet and I said: “We’ll find out when we get there.”

I wanted to promise them something. All four of them were looking at me.

I have never once in eight years promised any of those children anything about a person I do not control, and I was not going to start at eight thousand feet.

But I had put four children in matching coats on an aircraft, which is its own kind of promise, and I knew that then and I knew it at the time