What brought it back was not an apology, although there have been several and they have been good ones.
It was that he changed his telephone number and did not give her the new one for four months.
What I did instead is the only thing I am proud of in this entire account.
I rang Karenza.
Not my husband. Not a lawyer. Not anybody who could have helped me with any of the rest of it.
I rang the woman who had spent eleven months being lied to about my children, and it took me three weeks to work up to it, and I wrote notes first like a coward.
On a Thursday, in the January, for two hours and eleven minutes, and I told her about the eleven months.
What her mother had told her. What her mother had not told her. What was actually on those papers and why it would never have worked.
She did not say very much.
She asked four questions in two hours. All four of them were about dates — when, and then when, and then was that before or after the scan.
There was a long stretch in the middle where neither of us said anything at all and I could hear her kitchen. A tap. Something being put down.
And then she said the thing I have not been able to put down.
She said: I never asked you. I’m sorry I never asked you.
Twice. The second time more quietly, as though she were saying it to herself and had forgotten I was on the line.
Eleven months of being told a story about me by somebody else, and the first thing she reached for was not she lied to me.
It was I never checked.
Which is a thing almost nobody does, and which took a woman who had just lost eleven months of hope about four seconds to arrive at.
She has met the twins four times.
She is better with my daughter than anybody else in that family. She holds her more, she talks to her more, she brought a thing for her and nothing for him.
I think she is doing it on purpose. I am almost certain she is.
I have never mentioned it and I am never going to, and I watch her do it with a feeling I have not been able to name in eleven months.
