‘The problem I have, Ro, is that if this were true, you could have just left him,’ Adam says with a sigh. ‘You’re free to do that. Why not just wait until you were out of hospital and do it normally?’
I shake my head, frustrated. ‘Our world isn’t normal. It hasn’t been normal for a long time.’
Adam looks up. His face drains of colour.
‘And now there is a baby, no matter what else, Marc wouldn’t let me take her.’
I wonder if it’s a good thing or bad, how long we go then without saying a word.
It is finally late enough to be chilly for most people. I am only in a T-shirt and shorts now, slung on over my bikini, but Adam is shivering in a hoodie. He turns down my offer of a blanket.
‘Look, Romilly.’ He sighs. ‘I have to tell you something.’
What now, what now, what now? I am exhausted in my bones.
‘Loll agrees with him,’ says Adam, still easing that gun from me. ‘She says it too, that you have postpartum psychosis.’
Oh shit.
‘She doesn’t.’
He protests but I shut him down.
‘She’s faking,’ I insist, shaking my head hard. ‘She’s been faking so that she can get him on side, build his trust then be able to get the baby out of there to me. I told you, she helped me. She’s on my side.’
Adam is shaking his head now, no no no no no. He has his narrative, three days old, bedded in from Marc. My newcomer isn’t welcome.
‘The fact is that you need to come home, Ro,’ he says, decisive, a little impatience creeping in. ‘Fleur needs you.’
Punch. Punch. Punch.
‘Fleur?’
‘He was always going to name her, Romilly,’ he apologises, gently.
But it was a name that he had suggested when I was pregnant and had seen me pull a face about, eyes down on the baby name book as I ticked a plethora of options that I did like.
Fuck you, Marc. Fuck you.
Fleur.
My daughter.
My mind scans back over the last four days.
I know how it sounds, for me to have left my baby, believe me.
I know it’s the most awful thing. The unforgivable.
The truth is that when you’re terrified and you’re lost and something goes as wrong as that did, hours roll on and on and on and somewhere along the line you are encased deep in thick mud and it is impossible to pull your boots out.
And then those messages started coming. Confirming what he had already warned. He would call me crazy, take my baby, make sure I never saw her, done.
Threats about my safety as a mother: the final thing he’d need to justify to himself that it was reasonable to take the baby from me. He could do that; there’s enough cruelty running through his veins, enough bitterness.
I was an unfit mum.
If he took the baby away from me? He would simply be doing the responsible thing.
Adam interrupts my thoughts.
‘So what happens now?’ he asks.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I ask you not to tell Marc where I am. And then you probably do anyway?’
Adam puts his head in his hands.
‘Romilly, man, how can I not? There’s a baby there at home who needs you. There is a man begging me to fix this for him, telling me you are ill. But then there’s you, telling me that if I do fix it for him, it will ruin your life. There’s my girlfriend – who I think must have a hunch that she doesn’t trust Marc at the moment or something – agreeing with you …’
I thought so many times about telling Steffie what Marc did to me. But I was too worried. Worried she wouldn’t be able to keep it from Adam. Worried Adam would tell Marc what I’d said. Worried what that would mean that night when I walked through the door after a shift.
I trust Steffie.
But who was I to ask her to keep things from the person she loved?
I thought about having to make sure we never spoke about it via text, in case Adam saw her phone next to the bed.
Adam hits a mosquito that lands on his arm hard. Harder than necessary.
I jump.
We sit in silence then, letting the last few hours sink into our skins.
And then he reaches out, cuddles me so tight. Strokes that hair that still shocks me in its sparsity. Cares for me like I’m a child. I am close to falling asleep on his shoulder.
So tired.
So exhausted.
It’s hard to take that it’s then, when I feel so soothed, that he says the thing that destroys me.