‘Good that Adam’s not around,’ he says, not moving his eyes from mine over Fleur’s shoulder. I am still frowning into sunlight. ‘This is between husband and wife.’
He dips his forehead low onto our baby’s crown. ‘And our daughter.’
I move in a daze.
Everything else is pushed aside as I walk towards my baby, take her from Marc and inhale her scent, soapy, fleetingly like biscuits, then oddly familiar.
She’s a magnet.
That sensation overwhelms me, of wanting to push her back into my insides; to put my skin between her and any threat. I look at Marc’s mouth, set.
To start again.
I hold on tight.
Marc comes at me, arms outstretched, eyebrows raised in a question. Can I?
Can he?
I don’t react fast enough with a no and I am encased in a hug from my husband, Fleur too, as she sleeps in my arms.
When he moves away, he takes our daughter as well.
I know it’s not in my interest to object.
‘This has all got out of hand,’ Marc says gently, the baby with her tiny back to me on his shoulder.
He glances at me. Puts a placating hand up.
‘Look, maybe I haven’t acted my best at times,’ he says. ‘It’s a confusing time, being a bloke when your wife is pregnant. End of an era. So much responsibility. You’re pushed aside. We did everything very fast, you and me. Everything has a context, Romilly.’
You were the one who wanted a baby so soon. You.
‘But you know me.’
I feel my surety wobble again.
‘We need to be alone to sort this out,’ Marc says. His voice is gentle. Kind. ‘Just – and I am sorry to be rude but he doesn’t have kids; he isn’t married. Adam doesn’t get this, the magnitude of it all – our family.’
He strokes our daughter’s downy dark hair. I stare at the back of her head.
It’s just like mine.
He raises his eyebrows at me in question. Yes? I don’t know the answer. I just know I have to follow this girl, wherever she goes.
Seeing Marc has made me confused. The monster I had built up in my head has a receding hairline and Nike trainers and bags under his eyes and screws his forehead up to squint into the bright day because he has forgotten his sunglasses.
I think of Ella, denying everything.
But I saw the messages.
Didn’t I?
There is the problem too with simple brain space; I am so consumed now with looking at this tiny girl who nestled in my womb for nine months that I can’t process much else. Maybe it’s simpler than I thought. Maybe it’s just me, him, her – a triangle. Maybe I have made this more of a squiggle than it needed to be.
I am so tired.
Steffie thought it.
Adam too.
Would I know after all if I were experiencing delusions? Or would I feel exactly like this: it can’t be true; what is he thinking?
A hand on my back, and he moves me towards the car, murmuring quietly into my ear as we walk.
Nothing can scare you like that thought, back again: that I cannot trust my own mind.