He was a man who could talk about it to his mother for six years and not to me, because I had closed it in six seconds and he had taken that as the arrangement.
And in the April I asked Vida one more thing, which I had to make myself do.
I asked whether he had ever said anything about me.
And she said: “Only that you weren’t up to it.”
Not unkindly. It is what he had told her and he had believed it and he had been protecting me with it since 2019.
What has changed.
We say her name.
That is the whole of it and it sounds like nothing and it is not nothing.
Since about the February, Bryony is a person in our house. Not constantly. But she comes up, and neither of us flinches, and in the March we did the fourteenth properly for the first time — the two of us, an hour, nothing dramatic.
And Saul was different for about a month afterwards in a way I have not got words for.
And his mother Vida — who has known the name since 2019, which I found out in the April and which took the legs out of me for a week — said one thing to me in the summer.
She said: “He’s put her down, love.”
Meaning he has stopped carrying her on his own.
Six years.
And the forty tellings, which started about nine hours after it happened.
My sister, on the telephone, from that side room, at about half one on the Sunday afternoon.
And I told her about the mark and about his face and about that’s not possible.
And I did not tell her about Bryony.
Nine hours after finding out that my daughter had a name, I gave my own sister the version with the mystery in it and left the answer out.
And I have done that about forty times since. At the eight-week thing. At work in the January. Twice at that baby group.
It is a very good four minutes. The ten years. The warmer. The shoulder. His face.
And it ends on that’s not possible, and people make the noise.
And in the June a woman at that group asked me straight out what it had turned out to be.
And I said: “Oh — something from his side of the family.”
Seven words, to a stranger, about my own daughter, with Marnie asleep on my front.
And I said it easily, and it came out without a flicker, and I noticed that about myself afterwards and did not like it.
The envelope, again.
I have still not opened it.
Fourteen months since that night and I have not opened it, and it is in the same shoebox, and now it is in a wardrobe in the room where the cot is.
And I have taken it out twice. In the April and in the September.
And both times I got as far as holding it.
And both times I put it back, and the second time I was angry with myself in a way I had not expected, and I said something out loud in an empty room.
And the six of them, which I have been counting as six for ten years.
And in the May I did a thing I had been avoiding, which is that I wrote them down.
Dates, and how far, and what happened.
And I could do five of them off the top of my head and the sixth took me about forty minutes with old appointment letters.
And what I found is that I have been rounding.
The one in the November of 2021 was eleven weeks and I have been saying nine. The one in 2024 was later than I have ever said.
And Bryony is twenty-two weeks and I have said twenty-two for six years, and that one is right, because that one I have never been able to move.
And then I looked at the list and understood what it was.
It is six lines, and every single one of them is a measurement.
Weeks, dates, a hospital. Not one of them has anything in it about the day.
I have carried that list in my head for a decade and it is a chart.
And in twenty minutes behind a curtain in 2019, my husband got something that is not on it, and he has had it ever since, and I have been describing him for six years as the one who found it hardest to talk about.
And the last thing.
