I looked at the ceiling and I counted the tiles.
There are a particular sort in that hospital with little holes in them, and I did a row, and then I did another row, and I got to about eleven rows.
And behind a curtain eleven feet away my husband was holding our daughter and looking at a mark on her shoulder.
And I have described those twenty minutes, for six years, as while he was in with her, as though he had gone somewhere.
What I did not do.
Ask him.
That is the whole of it and it is not the same thing at all.
I did not have to look at that baby. I could have asked that man, at any point in six years, what she looked like.
Four words. What was she like.
And he would have told me, because he had been waiting from about the sixteenth of March, 2019, which is the day he started that sentence in a kitchen.
And I did not do it in 2019 and I did not do it in 2020 and I did not do it on any of the anniversaries, and we have never marked them.
Six years, and the only reason I know her name is that a mark on another baby’s shoulder forced it out of him at half past four in the morning.
The envelope.
They gave us one.
Photographs. They do it as a matter of course, and it is kind, and it went into my bag at St Jerome’s on the fifteenth of March, 2019, and I brought it home.
And it is in the bottom of the wardrobe in the back bedroom, in a shoebox with the hospital paperwork.
And I have never opened it.
And I knew exactly where it was, the entire time, through two house moves.
I have moved that box myself. Twice. It went in the car with me rather than in the van, both times, which is a thing I have never explained to anybody including myself.
And Saul has opened it.
He told me in the January. He has had it out perhaps a dozen times in six years, always in that room, always when I was out.
And he always put it back exactly where it was, because he had worked out that I knew where it was.
What he said at half past four.
It took him about an hour to get to it and I did not push him.
And in the end he said: “She had the same one.”
And I said: “The same what?”
And he turned Marnie slightly, in the blanket, so that I could see the back of her shoulder.
And he said: “There.”
