Eleven miles
from where Ellis lives, on a road he has driven down.
I told four people I was pregnant: my aunt, Ines Talbot, my friend Dara, and my GP. My own mother found out in the July and she is not a person who can hold anything, which is why she found out in the July.
I did my midwife appointments under Halliday. I registered at a different practice. I did not put one thing on the internet, not one photograph, for eight months, which if you are thirty-four is a form of disappearing.
And I worked. I did the books for a landscaping firm and a garage from that kitchen table until I was thirty-eight weeks, because I was not going to touch a penny of the trust while a divorce was live and because Ines told me, in exactly these words: “Take nothing you’d have to explain.”
