My phone went off on the counter.
Roland. Then again. Then a message I could read from where I was lying.
Nerys. Answer the phone. Now.
He knew. The car had reported in at some point, or the church had, or the driver had, and it had taken him about fifty minutes.
I reached for it and Dr. Osei put her hand flat on it and turned it face down.
“Don’t answer that.”
Then she sat down on the stool so that her eyes were level with mine, which I have since learned they teach and which works anyway.
She said she needed my consent to document some findings formally and to run some tests that were not routine.
I said, “Is my baby all right?”
She was very careful.
“Your baby has a heartbeat and is the right size for dates,” she said. “But there is something in your body that should not be in it.”
A nurse came in with a consent form already printed with my name at the top.
And the first thing I felt — before fear for the baby, before anything — was a specific and enormous dread about whether Roland would find out I had been outside his system.
I want that written down, because it tells you more about four years than anything else I could put here.
I said, “If I sign this, can my husband see it?”
And Dr. Osei said, “No. This record is already outside his system. It is not in the regional network and it will not be tonight.”
I signed it.
Then the room changed gear without anybody raising their voice. The nurse — Bree — drew blood into tubes I had never seen, sealed each one in front of me, wrote on each one, and photographed them.
Dr. Osei asked me whether Roland gave me anything at home.
I told her about the vitamin injections. Twice a week since the fourth month. He did them himself, in the kitchen, because I hate needles and he is good at it.
Then I said the other thing, and I said it almost as a joke, because it had been going on so long that it had become furniture.
I said my mother-in-law brings me a drink every morning. Herbal. She makes it at her house and brings it over in a silver cup with a lid.
Dr. Osei said, “Every morning?”
“Since about week nine.”
Neither of them reacted at all. Bree wrote it down and Dr. Osei nodded once.
That frightened me far more than a reaction would have.
Then the clinic bell went. Twice, then continuously.
Bree looked at the monitor by the door.
“Doctor. It’s him.”
Roland was outside the glass in his white coat with his hospital badge still on, hitting the door with the flat of his hand.
And standing beside him, in her good coat, at twenty past ten in the morning, was his mother.
Rosamund Vessey had the silver cup in her hand.
PART 2 — EVERYBODY’S WATCHING
I met Roland Vessey when I was twenty-seven, at my father’s funeral reception, where he had come with a colleague.
He was thirty-four and calm in a way that felt like being handed something to lean on, and my father had died eleven days earlier, and I have thought a great deal since about a man who does his hunting in that room.
We married fourteen months later.
The first year was not controlling. It was attentive. There is a difference at the time and there is no difference at all in hindsight, and that is the whole trick.
He drove me places because parking is a nightmare. He came to appointments because he knew the system. He handled the money because he was better at it and because I was, in that period, not able to look at a spreadsheet with my father’s name on it.
By year two he had opinions about my mother. By year three she was a stressor and I was seeing her on video.
