You can keep the girl.
Four words, offered as a concession, about a human being who was eleven feet away and six hours old.
For a few seconds I genuinely thought I had misheard her.
I had been out of theatre for about five hours. I was on painkillers and I had not slept in thirty.
Karenza is my husband’s younger sister. She has struggled for years to have a child and I have always felt for her — properly, not politely.
But sympathy did not explain the documents lying beside me.
I have sat on appeals involving family arrangements. I know what it looks like when somebody wants something badly and goes about it wrongly, and I have been patient about it in writing more than once.
This was not that.
They were papers surrendering my parental rights.
I read the heading twice and then the first clause, which is what you do, because eleven years of reading documents does not switch off for anaesthetic.
And the thing that told me everything was the formatting. They had been printed somewhere. They had been printed in advance, on good paper, with a date already in it.
PART 3
During the pregnancy, Vespera had become strangely fixated on my son.
She called him the family heir. She said it in front of people. She treated my daughter as though she were an afterthought, and once, at a dinner in the March, she referred to her as the other one.
She had suggested, at that same dinner, that Karenza could raise one of the twins.
My husband shut it down inside four seconds and we assumed it was another ridiculous remark from a woman who makes them.
She was not joking.
She had been costing it, which is a different activity entirely and takes months.
For eleven months, by the arithmetic I was able to do afterwards. Possibly longer.
A woman sat down at some point in the spring and worked out which of my children she was going to ask for, and in what order, and on which afternoon.
I said: these are my children. I’m not signing anything.
She looked almost offended.
That is the thing I keep going back to. Not angry. Not caught. Offended, as though I had been rude at a table.
Which tells you how far inside her own version she was. In that version, she was being generous, and I had just failed to be gracious about it.
