‘My sister,’ I reassure him. ‘Of course, my sister, Adam.’
‘Loll knew?’ he says. ‘But she …’
I think of my sister, who doesn’t watch films or read fiction because she doesn’t understand suspending your disbelief. Why would you waste your time, she says, when there are so many facts to learn? My sister is literal; a pharmacist who deals in fact and truth with everyone who walks up to the counter in our local chemist.
And yet, there she has been next to them on the sofa, lie after lie after lie.
I can see how this would be baffling to anyone to learn. But something else about Loll: she is thorough.
‘She’s been trying to stay on Marc’s side – or to seem that way – so she could be his confidante and that way she could be alone with the baby,’ I say quietly.
His chest rises and falls too quickly.
‘So she could get her out and to me. I couldn’t think straight to make any sort of plan but Loll could. The problem is that Marc never leaves the baby alone. Maybe a hunch that he’d better keep her close or somehow I’ll come back for her.’
I twist my bangle now, around and around my wrist.
‘He’s good with her,’ says Adam, a little defensive.
I nod. Not surprised.
‘It’s always been that way, Marc is brilliant with his nieces and nephews. Was far more into the idea of having kids than I ever was.’
I know how this stacks up in the public eye too: extra points for Marc for doing some basic parenting; minus points for me for being something so unnatural as an absent mother.
No wonder I am struggling to be believed.
Our baby was very much planned, steered by Marc. Wasn’t everything? He had a handy little app for me; installed it on my phone one day when he was on there anyway checking my messages.
Carefully removed my underwear when the app told him he should.
I lay there the first time hoping it didn’t work quite yet, that we had a little longer. We had only been together nine months.
I didn’t get my wish.
But that’s fine, I thought. That’s fine. Didn’t Loll shriek with joy when I told her I was pregnant, so soon after our wedding?
Didn’t she tell me how rare it was to meet a man these days who wanted to settle down, wanted to have a family? And he was so good-looking too, wasn’t he, she nudged me. Win win win win win.
So who was I to whine about wanting to wait a little longer? Me, a woman in my thirties, who’d had exes who wouldn’t commit. How petulant! How ungrateful.
I come back to the now. Think, Romilly, think.
‘Adam, did Marc tell you he sent me messages, after I left?’
Adam nods. ‘Of course. Asking where you were. Begging you to come back. Reassuring you. He said he sent them constantly, the same as we all did.’
I laugh, kind of.
‘Not quite the same,’ I whisper.
In the distance there is the sound of dance music. A club up in the hills; the type that is a pilgrimage for any teenagers in a twenty-kilometre radius, deprived of cities, Marseille too far away, too young to appreciate their beautiful village and a rustic bistro. Still craving sweat, beer, chaos.
‘Adam, the messages told me, over and over. Told me I would lose my baby because of this. That he would get me arrested or sectioned. I thought if I saw him again, it was one or the other.’
And that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?
Those messages were an assault. By the end, I might as well have been unconscious in a ditch.
‘It was too big a risk to take. I needed to get her back another way.’
I wipe a palm across my brow. My chest feels tight like it’s wrinkled.
Adam puts his own head in his big familiar hands; knuckles dry as a bone. I look up, see the exact moment that the sun dips behind the mountains. And then to my side, at his face. Cheeks you want to pinch and kind eyes.
He still needs convincing.
‘I thought if I went back, he would have her taken off me for good,’ I press, repeating the point so he gets it. ‘If I stayed away, Loll could bring her to me. Do you see?’
An emotional decision. A panicked decision. A parental decision, perhaps, even though I’m not naïve enough to know how many would question that justification.
Adam moves from the chair to sit on the floor, knees to his chest.
‘No, Romilly, I don’t see at all,’ he says, patiently repeating. ‘All I see, like Marc told me, is a woman experiencing a mental health condition who has lost sense of all reality.’
I hear his phone vibrate in his pocket.
See his fingers creep towards it.
I feel myself holding my breath.