It’s time for the medical experts. The people who weren’t there at the time, but have views on what happened on that night, because my baby’s body is merely evidence to them. A specimen, a slab of muscles and bones and blood.
There are two experts, one for the prosecution and one for the defense, paid hundreds of pounds each. Their words are expensive. I look across at Becky in the dock. She knows what happened, either through her own actions or because she knows what she didn’t do. I contemplate her. After a few seconds, she must sense me looking, because she looks straight back. Our eyes meet. Neither of us smiles. Neither of us looks away, either. We just look at each other, holding each other’s gaze, for a few seconds.
Scott clears his throat next to me—a soft, familiar uh ah—and he moves his hand to my knee. I stop looking at Becky and look down at his hand instead. I place mine on it and wonder whose Layla’s would have grown to look more like. Scott’s hands are small and square, with neat, rounded fingernails. Mine are long. “Piano player’s hands,” Mum always used to say, even though I was rubbish at music.
Scott and I met at a dinner party, which is far too grand a term for what it really was. He was heartbroken, recently abandoned by an ex, and spent much of the evening talking about her. “There was just no warning, you know?” he kept saying to me. Somehow, the friendly counseling I offered became something more and I remember thinking, one night, at age twenty-three: God, you will do.
I didn’t think like that when he proposed. He makes me happy, I thought, picturing his freckled nose, the calm way he embarked upon tasks. He believed in equality, did half the housework, if not more. He never shouted at me, always asked me pleasantly how my day was. Yes. We were happy. We turned our mobile phones off every Wednesday evening—“hump day” we called it—and cooked together. I’d fry the meat while he chopped the onions. The dishes got more elaborate—two courses, three—and the conversations deeper, less formal, as we lost self-consciousness, absorbed in the cooking. Every Thursday morning, I felt as though I had taken a holiday.
But then, two weeks after the wedding, the day we got back from our Sardinian honeymoon, I woke in the night and remembered that thought I’d once had: You’ll do. I stared across at Scott in horror. His form was exactly the same. The same sleeping position. How could I have thought such a thing? I suppressed it, pushing it downward like compacting soil.
It’s funny how a single thought can come to define something—a marriage, a baby—but it has. You’ll do. And now, even though years have passed, and what it was then isn’t what it is now, I still repeat that phrase to myself, often, in the shower, or late at night when he’s away. You’ll do.
Did I mean it? Were we doomed from the start, or did I once love him fully, completely? I don’t have a clue. In the haze of what’s happened since, and the grief, I find I don’t know. But we were three, and now we are two: He is everything I have.
“The prosecution calls Julia Todd,” Ellen says.
Scott shifts on the seat—he’s tall, with long legs, and the public gallery is cramped—and we watch the consultant pediatric and perinatal pathologist make her way to the witness box. The courtroom is hushed.
The pathologist.
The postmortem.
The autopsy.
I grit my teeth and stay sitting. I have to be here. I have to find out the truth.
For Layla.