My parents threw me out at nineteen because I wouldn’t end my pregnancy. Ten years later I drove back with my son and knocked on the same door and I finally told them who his father was.

And I said: and about why I couldn’t get rid of him.
PART 3

When I said I could not tell them, at nineteen, I was not protecting a man.

I was keeping a promise to their son.

My brother Rhys was twenty-two when he got his diagnosis.

He kept it from our parents for eight months. I was the only person on this earth who knew, and I only knew because I found a hospital letter in the door pocket of his car when I borrowed it in the February.

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He made me swear in a car park outside a garden centre.

I was eighteen. I swore because he asked me to, and because he was crying, and because I did not have the faintest idea what I was agreeing to.

The reason he would not tell them is the part that people find hardest, and it is not complicated at all when you have met my father.