And his wife was eleven feet away reading about pigmentation.
And when he finally said she had the same one, I put the phone face down on the blanket.
I remember doing it. That is the clearest thing I have from the whole night.
What I asked him.
The wrong thing.
I have gone over it about four hundred times.
I said: “Why didn’t you tell me?”
At half past four in the morning, to a man holding a newborn, nine hours after a labour, with a mark on a shoulder in front of him.
***Why didn’t you tell me.***
And he did not say the obvious thing, which was available to him and which he had earned.
He said: “I didn’t think you’d want it.”
And then he said: “Sorry.”
He apologised to me. At half past four in the morning. In a side room at St Jerome’s.
And the nine months before Marnie, which I have put down as waiting for it to go.
