PART 3 — THE JAR
Here is the thing that decided all of it, and I did not plan it and I did not understand why I was doing it at the time.
On the morning of the appointment, Rosamund came at eight-ten as she always did. She let herself in with her key, put the cup on the counter with the lid on it, and stayed for four minutes talking about a neighbour’s roof.
After she left I did not drink it.
I got a clean jam jar out of the cupboard, poured that cup into it, screwed the lid on, rinsed the silver cup and left it upside down on the rack so it would look drunk, and put the jar in the bottom of my bag under a scarf.
I have been asked about this by two doctors, a detective, and a lawyer, and the honest answer is that I do not know.
I had not consciously suspected anything. If you had stopped me in that kitchen and asked me why I was doing it I could not have told you.
Some part of me had been keeping accounts for a long time without informing the rest of me.
I gave that jar to Bree at about eleven o’clock, out of a handbag, in a room with a locked front door and a man outside it.
Bree Tancredi’s face when I took it out is the second thing I will never forget about that day.
What came back, over eleven days, was this.
In my blood: two substances. One a sedative class, one an anticoagulant class. Neither of them has any business anywhere near a pregnancy and neither had been prescribed to me by anybody, ever.
I am not going to name either of them and I have asked that they not be named in anything I have signed since. Dr. Osei asked me to make that decision and I am glad she did.
In the cup: one of the two, at a level the report describes in a way I had to have explained twice.
The injections were the other one.
He had been putting one of those two things into my arm twice a week in our kitchen since the fourth month, while I looked at the ceiling because I hate needles, and telling me it was a B-complex.
And his mother had been carrying the other one across two streets every morning at ten past eight in a polished cup with a lid on it, since week nine, and standing in my kitchen for four minutes talking about roofs.
The baby was, at that point, all right.
I am going to say the rest of that now rather than make anybody wait. My daughter was born at thirty-six weeks and four days, small, in a unit with a lot of people in the room, and she spent nineteen days in a special care cot and she is two now and she is fine.
Fine is a load-bearing word and I use it deliberately. She is being followed, and she will be for a while, and every appointment is a day I do not enjoy.
