We have not spoken since the wedding. She came to it and she sat at the back and she left before the speeches, and the week before, at her kitchen table, she had told me exactly what that family was — very plainly, in about four sentences — and I had told her she was jealous and that she had never liked anything that was mine.
I had her number the entire way to that hospital.
I had it through three months of cleaning offices at night on an industrial estate with my ankles swelling over my shoes.
I had it when I was printing emails two pages at a time at a library so the woman on the desk would not notice.
And I would rather drive myself through red lights on the ring road at five in the morning, in labour, on my own, than make one phone call to a woman who was going to say she had told me so.
