By year four I did not book anything from my own phone.
Nobody took anything away from me. I want to put that as plainly as I can for anybody reading this from inside it. Nothing was ever taken. Things were handled, until there was nothing left that I handled.
There were four moments I could have caught it and did not, and I can date all of them.
The first was the phone, in year two. Mine broke and he replaced it that afternoon, which was kind, and he set it up, which was kinder, and the account was in his name because it went on the family plan and it was cheaper.
I did not think about that for three years. The location sharing had been on since the first day and I had agreed to it, in a kitchen, in about eleven seconds, because he said he worried on my drive home.
The second was my job. I was a schools liaison officer for a museum trust and I loved it and I gave it up in year three, and the conversation was about the commute and about how we did not need the money.
We did not need the money. That was true. It is also true that eleven months later I had no colleagues, no reason to be anywhere at nine in the morning, and nobody who would notice if I stopped turning up.
The third was my mother.
He never once told me not to see her. What he did was be reasonable about her, out loud, for two years. Gwen is a lot. Gwen winds you up. You were in bits for two days after that call.
Every one of those was, on its own, partly true, which is what made it work. By the end of it I was managing my own mother down to a video call every fortnight and I thought it was my idea.
The fourth was the dizziness itself.
I told him in the fourth month. He ran bloods. He told me they were fine.
I told him again in the fifth month and he said the word anxious, gently, in a voice with a stethoscope in it.
And I stopped mentioning it, because I had begun to believe that the reason I felt like that was that I was the kind of woman who felt like that.
That is the one I would put in front of anybody. It is not that he told me I was imagining it. It is that he agreed with me sympathetically until I stopped bringing it up.
The hospital does a spring dinner. Staff and partners, about forty-five people, at a hotel on the ring road.
I was four months pregnant and I had been dizzy for about three weeks and I had said so twice.
Rosamund came to those dinners. She has come to that dinner for nineteen years, since her husband was on the board.
I was standing with two of Roland’s registrars and I had a glass of water in my hand. Just water; I was four months pregnant.
Rosamund came over, took it out of my hand, and set it down on the table behind her.
Then she put the silver cup into my hand and folded my fingers around it.
And Roland — who was standing right there, in a dinner jacket, in front of forty-five colleagues — said:
“Give me that. She doesn’t decide what goes into her body. I’m her husband and her doctor. Take the cup. Everybody’s watching.”
The table closest to us went silent. Then the next one.
Forty-five people. His head of department was eleven feet away.
Nobody said one word.
A registrar called Priya looked at the floor. I know she heard it because I watched her hear it.
And I laughed. That is what I did. I laughed, in the way you do, and said something about how he was very bossy, and I drank out of that cup, and the evening carried on.
The next morning I woke up at eleven with no memory of the drive home.
Roland told me I had been tired and had slept in the car and that I should be careful with my sugar.
I believed that for five months.
