I try to take a deep breath but talking about it is catching over and over in my throat and I can’t, however I try.
‘Are you OK?’ Adam says. ‘Romilly, are you …’
I can’t speak but nod, squeezing his fingers, just give me a second, a second.
I want to be home. I want to be ripping up my wedding pictures. I want to be with my baby. I want my life back. I want to sleep. I want to be still.
A second, just let me figure out how to stop this.
Eventually it passes.
‘All right?’ he says.
I nod.
Pull my knees into my chest. It happens on the street, in my bed, when I am talking about something else and think I am fine. Sometimes it wakes me up, a bullet, and stops me from sleeping again even though it is only 2 a.m.
It’s not just panic attacks that do that. My husband does it too. He wants to talk. It doesn’t matter if I am in the third trimester, exhausted. There is a list of my faults to run through.
I take my hand away from Adam, picturing those long nights. Picturing myself in work trying to lift a brownie into a paper bag and realising I was too tired even for that. Looking up to see Steffie frowning at me. Avoiding her gaze again.
Adam stands up then, paces away from the tent.
When we meet back under the awning, he’s coloured in the last part of the picture.
‘So you’re saying …’ he begins, patiently. ‘You’re saying you were so terrified of Marc, that when you had a chance to run in hospital, you took it, even though you had just had a baby?’
I nod.
‘I realised that family picture I’d been holding on for was impossible now. I lay in hospital with what he’d said going round and round. He would take my baby. Tell people I was crazy. I believed him, Adam; that man would do anything.’
And she was a girl. All night, I thought about that. A girl, who would become a woman. What was I setting in motion for my daughter?
Adam’s fingertips rub at his forehead.
‘We had to go, before he had the chance. I called Loll from hospital.’
He pushes harder at his skin.
‘If Marc finds me, after I’ve done this …’
Adam doesn’t ask me to finish the end of the sentence. Pushes his fingers into his forehead like he is kneading dough.
‘Go back to this woman,’ he says, frowning. ‘The reason you say you came here.’
Does that mean it is going in? Do I have a chance?
I look around. It’s dark. Teenagers stumble past feeling the effects of the first beers with mums and dads who are loosening their rules for the holidays. Soon, the adults will sleep before morning comes and they head for chocolat chaud on the terrace in their shorts and sandals.
‘Her name is Ella.’
I wait for recognition to cross Adam’s face. Nothing. But why would there be? Marc and Adam only met when we did.
At first, I had looked up Marc’s ex Ella like anyone does; he hadn’t told me her surname but I had cobbled together enough information to find her on Google a few months after we met. It was casual; an innate human curiosity about the one who came before.
But Ella was significant; I knew that. She was the only ex he ever mentioned – and only when I pushed him, wanting to know the past, wanting to fill in the gaps. When he did, his face changed shape in a way that unsettled me, even in the early days. When I asked how things ended between them, he was vague.
Later though, when things turned dark between Marc and I, I messaged her.
I know it’s odd to be in touch, I said. But I am having a baby with your ex Marc. We are married. Is there anything I need to know about your relationship?
What was I looking for, really?
Shared experience. Someone to identify with. Someone to confirm I wasn’t losing it: your husband trying to drown you was bad, wasn’t typical. But keeping everything inside all the time, plastering on a happy face, was making me doubt myself; worry I was overreacting.
Whatever I wanted from Ella though, I didn’t get it.
She blocked me without replying. Every online trace of her was set then to private. Some even disappeared afterwards.
When I left my baby in hospital, and the threats from Marc started, I knew I had to try again. She was the only person who could prove it wasn’t me; it was him, as he started to tell everyone I had postpartum psychosis.
And hadn’t her reaction when I first got in touch confirmed that I was probably right about what happened between them?
‘She’s the only person who knows what he’s like,’ I told Loll, the day I left hospital.
‘Not true,’ said Loll. ‘We all know now. You’ve told us.’
But my narrative wasn’t enough.
Marc’s version of events worked. Him? A bad guy? When all he had tried to do is look after his baby and protect his wife from a mental health condition?
I messaged Ella from Loll’s account. She blocked that one too.
I called the school she now worked at, in the South of France. They agreed to pass on a message. When I called back they told me to stop calling. The third time they put the phone down on me.
I started to pack a bag.
Loll stood over me, unpacking it as I packed like I was a runaway child.
‘You can’t be serious,’ she said, trying hard not to raise a voice that was desperate to shout in frustration. ‘You’re going to travel hundreds of miles away from your baby? As if this mess isn’t bad enough, Romilly! At least if you’re here, round the corner, we can get you back with her fast. This way you’re putting so much distance between you. And for what? This Ella won’t speak to you anyway. She’s shown that already.’
I touched my hair. Stopped packing for a second. Turned away from her so I was in profile.
‘Do you know why my hair is this short, Loll?’
Like I say, it used to be down to my bum.
Two months earlier, I had woken up and found it chopped off and scattered like confetti all over my bedroom.