He has known since 2012 that I will always choose the version of myself that is least embarrassing to defend.
And the six years, which that man used as the weapon and which I am going to set out plainly, because the sentence he said in that corridor has a specific answer.
We were seen at a clinic in Brackwater between 2016 and 2022.
Everybody is tested. That is how it works.
There was no single cause found. Unexplained — which is a real category and which about one in four couples get, and which is, if I am honest, harder than a reason, because there is nothing to treat and nothing to blame.
Five cycles. Two that did not reach
transfer. One that ended at nine weeks in the March of 2019.
And at no point in six years, in any letter, in any clinic appointment, in any conversation with any professional, was it ever said that the problem was mine.
He said it. From about 2018, steadily, at home — that it was obviously me, that his body was fine, that I was too old and had left it too late for my career.
I was thirty-two in 2018.
And in the complaint, in the May of 2023, he wrote that I had been “receiving treatment for mental health difficulties associated with infertility”, which is a sentence constructed to be almost true: I saw a counsellor at that clinic eleven times in 2019, as they recommend, as most people do, and I declared precisely nothing because there is nothing to declare.
He turned the eleven appointments where I was looked
after into the thing that took my clinics away.
What Rhett did afterwards.
He has not apologised and he is not going to and I have stopped waiting for the scene where he does.
The complaint is not in itself a criminal matter and nobody is going to prosecute him for it, which took me about four months to accept.
What has actually happened to him is civil and slow and boring and extremely effective.
The settlement went. The house is going. There is a costs order against him from the February that he cannot pay, and a second claim that Hollis says will be listed next year.
He has moved to Brackwater and is living in a rented flat with Yvie and that boy, and I know those facts only because they are in the papers.
And the thing I have had to make peace with is that he
is forty-two, and he is not going to look at any of this and understand it. He is going to understand it as a thing that was done to him.
The corridor.
One more thing about that day, because people always want the moment.
It was not satisfying.
I have thought about it a great deal and I would not have it again.
That was a paediatric corridor on a Wednesday afternoon. There were eleven people in that waiting area and two of them were children in wheelchairs, and one family had come out of a conversation I know the shape of.
And in the middle of it a man said the word infertile at volume about a colleague of theirs, and a bottle broke, and a lot of frightened people had to watch two adults have a divorce in front of them.
The sister on that floor is called
Bernadine and she is sixty and she has worked there twenty-two years, and she got everybody moved and the floor cleared inside about ninety seconds, and then she came and found me in the sluice and said: “Right. Breathe.”
