PART 4 — TWELVE FORTY-ONE
Saskia’s phone was in the bag Nieves brought in.
I looked at it on the Sunday. She was awake by then and she told me to.
At twelve forty-one on the Thursday she rang her father.
At twelve forty-three she rang him again.
At twelve forty-nine. At twelve fifty-four. At twelve fifty-eight.
Five calls in seventeen minutes. Two of them connected and went to voicemail after the full ring. Three went straight through, which means the phone had been declined.
At one oh-one she rang Nieves.
At one oh-four Nieves rang emergency services from a car.
My twelve-year-old spent seventeen minutes ringing her father while her throat was closing.
I asked her about it in the quietest voice I have ever used, about a week later, at home.
I asked her why she had not rung 911 first.
And my daughter said, “Because Dad says it’s not that bad.”
She said it the way a child reports a rule.
She also told me she had taken the pen out of her bag and looked at it and could not work out whether it was one of the old ones from the drawer, because there had been old ones in the drawer for a while.
She stood in a kitchen at twelve forty and could not tell whether the thing in her hand would work.
So she rang the person who had told her for two years that it was not that bad.
That is the sentence I am never going to get out from underneath, and the man who said it is not the only person who let her be alone in that kitchen.
I was in Thornhaven. I had been in Thornhaven or somewhere like it for about eleven days a month for four years, and I had built the arrangement in that house on the assumption that one of the two adults in it was doing the thing he said he was doing.
I never checked an expiry date in this house. Not once, in six years.
I have an operations director who cannot spend four thousand dollars without me seeing it.
I did not know what was in my daughter’s bathroom cabinet.
