I looked at the ceiling and I counted the tiles.
There are a particular sort in that hospital with little holes in them, and I did a row, and then I did another row, and I got to about eleven rows.
And behind a curtain eleven feet away my husband was holding our daughter and looking at a mark on her shoulder.
And I have described those twenty minutes, for six years, as while he was in with her, as though he had gone somewhere.
What I did not do.
Ask him.
That is the whole of it and it is not the same thing at all.
I did not have to look at that baby. I could have asked that man, at any point in six years, what she looked like.
Four words. What was she like.
And he would have told me, because he had been waiting from about the sixteenth of March, 2019, which is the day he started that sentence in a kitchen.
