I have changed one of my first nappies, my husband passing me wipe after wipe after wipe, and then – when I did a far from expert job – a new vest and babygrow for her too.
When she cried, he soothed her, rocked her, walked up and down the house with her.
In the end I went to the kitchen. Got a glass of water. Stared at the wall. It was preferable to what was in the other room: seeing them together was almost unbearable.
Now, I watch Marc sit down on the too-hard sofa and cuddle our daughter into his large frame. She is fretful. Rooting, I think they call it. I feel my right breast sting.
Do I offer? Could I? Would I know where to start? I think of those hours in the hospital. We had made a beginning. We could pick up from there.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Marc, unscrewing a bottle of instant formula from his bag, decanting one-handed into a bottle I remember ordering online.
I nod. Look away. Leave it.
I stand in the hall staring at magnolia walls for as long as my throbbing vagina will allow me. Then I perch on the sofa and do the same, as my husband feeds our baby.
I watch the baby suckle. Her throat swallow. Feel my own mirror it. Gulp hard.
I look at Marc.
He will never grasp the pain that I have felt over the last five days.
Inside me, I have been scribbled in with black.
Options have felt closed off to me like rows in a Connect 4 game. I stared at the board; couldn’t see how this could work.
All I could do was keep loading up the circles.
Me, who feels everything like it’s being sprayed onto me, fake tan in a booth. The guilt over missing a friend’s birthday can ruin whole evenings; break-ups have felt like grief.
And yet I did this.
Every time I have spoken to Loll.
‘Have you got her?’
‘Not yet, Romilly. Not yet.’
I didn’t get how it could be impossible. At times, I was angry with my sister. Was she trying hard enough?
Could she not spirit her out in her sleep? No, she said. The baby slept in an attachment joined to Marc’s bed. I know, I said, I bought that attachment. Spent hours of my life researching the attachment. Reading reviews of the bloody attachment.
But surely Marc slept deeply; he must be exhausted? Yes, she said, he must be – but he doesn’t sleep deeply. He’s always half-awake for the baby. Holds her hand often to comfort her. There is no way she would get her up and out of the house without him noticing.
My heart hurt and hurt and hurt.
I’d focused everything on Ella. And she’d answered like it was nothing.
‘Romilly?’ asks Marc again, somewhere, sometime, somehow.
I went to buy supplies when I got here. I picked up toilet roll. I paid money.
How is it possible, even in the darkest times, to go through these life motions? To act as though the minutiae matters?
‘Romilly.’
Sometimes, it was like I had a migraine but instead of flashing lights I saw babies, babies, babies.
One baby.
What was I doing here, when my baby was born only days ago?
‘ROMILLY!’
Marc. Really here.
I turn to him.
‘I’m going to put her down in the travel cot,’ he says, gesturing at our daughter in his arms with his chin. ‘Okay?’
I nod. Watch him walk across the room. He must hate that bald spot, I think, as I stare at it moving further away from me. He must absolutely fucking hate it.
I take in the place then that we have come to for the first time. Someone’s home, or second home. A photograph of a man playing an accordion in nearby Eygalieres market. Provence in the 1800s, the women in large-brimmed hats, wide skirts. A vintage poster from the tourist board in Cassis, one from Marseilles, Arles.
I watch them across the room, Marc and the baby.
Can I do what Loll didn’t manage? Distract Marc enough? Get the baby out of here?
But I think of the strength of my sister, and my own weakened body and mind. How can I do it, if she couldn’t?
When Loll is a superhero.
I have thought about going back so many times.
But how could I face what awaited me there?
The horror as I put my key in the door.
The midwife appalled – me the first she had known to do this; hopefully the last.
A baby who didn’t know me.
A husband who made it clear he did. The version of me he wanted to paint, at least.
And what came next, as he made sure that was it for us. As I was removed for good. Police. Social services. Psychiatric units.
The crazy one. The one who left her baby. The two weren’t hard to paint into the same picture.
I imagined headlines. Judgement. Vitriol.
And you’ll never guess what else: that awful woman spread lies about that lovely husband, the doting dad. Can you believe that?
But something else, now, is certain.
I can’t leave without Fleur.
Not this time.
We go together, my family and I. All. Or nothing at all.