I look at Adam, and I start to tell a story I never wanted to tell.
‘Adam, being in that lake out here is the first time I’ve been swimming in seven months.’
Not because I was pregnant.
God, that wouldn’t have been enough to stop me.
‘So why?’ asks Adam.
I bite my lip.
When it happened, we had been together for almost a year, married for four months. I went for a swim at the beach. It was a pretty cold afternoon, early evening really, and there wasn’t another soul around.
Except suddenly, there was.
‘Marc had turned up at the beach and was wading in after me. He was angry with me about something – spending too much time at the beach, yep the man could even be jealous of sea water. I tried to swim away from him but I was close to shore and had to wade and he reached out. Grabbed me.’
The air has tightened.
I swallow.
‘There was no build-up, Adam. No warning.’
I try to breathe.
‘He was already angry when he arrived.’
Twist my rings around, again, again, again.
‘I didn’t even have time to ask a question, to say something to snap him out of it.’
Twist.
Twist.
‘He grabbed my face.’
I realise I am whispering. Shocked by my own words.
‘He shoved it down with this grip … this grip that felt unmovable, Adam. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was unrelenting, like stone. That’s the only way I can describe it.’
A whoop then, and a splash, as someone leaps in a distant pool. But I can barely register it. Now I’ve started, I have to finish.
‘And then came the water. It felt like it was inside my brain. I tried and tried to turn my head but it was impossible.’
I look up at Adam. The whisper is even quieter.
‘I had pretty much given up.’
I keep looking at my friend, this good man. I know it must be near impossible for him to comprehend such a bad one.
‘So why did he stop?’ Adam’s voice is ice.
I sigh. ‘He stopped because of what I did.’
I had to point to my stomach. I was under water and couldn’t say the words: I’m pregnant. So I angled my finger down in the air and hoped he got the message.
Hoped that meant he would let me live.
Why hadn’t I told him when I found out I was having a baby in the first place, the week before?
Because his rages had been getting worse.
Because I knew that once I said those words, I’m pregnant, to a man who had always wanted to be a father, there was no untangling myself. I couldn’t be his ex Ella, who I knew from my searches had a new life in France. No. I would be tied up with Marc, like chains in a messy jewellery box, and there would be no unravelling us.
When he pulled me out of the water, he screamed at me for not telling him and then wept as I lied and said I had only just found out; was waiting for a special moment to share the news.
Did he believe me? God knows. But there was an apology. Tens of them. Hugs. Excuses: he’d had a bad day, he never really would have done it, he was about to let me come up anyway, and at least maybe now I wouldn’t be so obsessed with the water.
A towel wrapped around me and careful arms guiding me up the beach to home. I saw his face when he found out there was a baby.
I had been right: I was protected now.
‘Or so I thought.’
You need more, Adam?
If you need more, I have more.
Uncomfortable, I clamber back up to the camping chair. Pull my knees up to my chest; my flip-flops dropping to the ground. I feel a mosquito on my big toe. Swat.
I reach to my right and sip from my water bottle. Tonight the weather is so close that even that feels like a major effort; I want to keep as still as I can to be able to bear the heat.
I look down at him, this friend of mine. Of ours. Or am I kidding myself? Marc’s friend. Do I not stand a chance?
Adam moves round so he’s facing me without cricking his neck. Says nothing.
I picture – as I have done so many times lately – Marc and me on our wedding day. Adam on his wing (was there something odd about that, in retrospect, that his best man was someone he had only known for a few months?), Steffie on mine. A field on our local farm overlooking North Wales; the place we picked up eggs from every week, sticking £1.50 in the honesty box and checking in on their veg cart. We had become friends with the farmers, Alicia and Jim, and their girls Trixie and Anastasia who roamed around in their wellies as they sold their giant cauliflowers and home-pickled beets. When I told them we were getting married, it was Alicia who suggested we did it there, even with the short notice. It was a dream of a suggestion.
The official ceremony was done and dusted at a registry office with little joy. But here, we went for it. My dress was vintage, its skirt the shape of a bell, bare feet on the grass. I had wanted to be pressing my toes into sand at the moment I said I do but the logistics of a beach wedding in the UK were too tricky, Marc said, and it was best we did it quickly; why hang around, he wanted to get on with having a baby.
Grass it was then, and it wasn’t a bad second.
As the humanist minister said her words, I looked across at the view we had in Thurstable to the dramatic Welsh mountains. This place, with its hundred shades of blue, ink spilt, open fountain pens thrown carelessly across the sky.
I looked back at Steffie. Downwards at my feet, specks of mud across the big toe.
As I said ‘I do’, I looked right in the eye of an alpaca. When Marc echoed me, a horse brayed loudly like a cheer. You could probably hear us laughing across the estuary; my grin was as wide as the aisle.
It would all be okay, I thought. Any hints of what were to come were just what life entailed. No one could be perfect all the time. So what if Marc sulked sometimes; so what if he had a temper? So what if some things I did irritated him? Did I think being an adult was all eggs Benedict for brunch and long weekends in Barcelona?
I look down now at Adam, still on the ground.
I see his phone sitting next to him.
I hand my water bottle down to him. He swigs. Passes it back.
I plough on, my grim, grim story unfinished.
The phone lights up again.
I know messages are pinging in from Marc.
And I know I am running out of time.