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 third was a telephone call in the November of 2018. She got through. I was twenty-seven years old, eleven months into doing it on my own with four of them, and I was standing in a kitchen.

And I said four words to that woman.

Never contact us again.

Flat. I did not shout. I have never shouted at anybody in my life and I did not start on that one.Four words, in a kitchen, at twenty-seven years old, to a woman of seventy who had just said her own name into a telephone and then waited.

Four words. And then I hung up, and I was proud of them, and I have repeated that story at about four tables over eight years and been told every single time that I was right.

And the fourth is the one I did not know about until Christmas Day.

In the April of 2019, Eudora Vail flew to Texas.