I said: what’s wrong with him?
My voice came out wrong. It came out like somebody else’s.
And he looked up at me with tears standing on his lashes and he said:
Who is this baby’s father?
Cold went through me from the top down.
Because there is only one reason a doctor asks you that in that voice ten minutes after a birth, and I had read about it at three in the morning on a phone, and it is never good.
I said: Tobiah Wrexham.
And that doctor’s hands tightened on the blanket. I watched his knuckles change colour.
He said the name back. Quietly, to himself. Tobiah Wrexham.
At that exact moment the door swung open.
And my ex-husband walked in, smiling.
PART 3
He had not come to see his son.
I knew that before he opened his mouth, because he did not look at the baby. Not once. He looked at me, and at the room, and at the doctor, in that order.
