And the reason is not complicated and it is not flattering. I wanted that family.
I had wanted it since about the fourth month. And every time something did not fit — no photographs, no in-laws, no newborn pictures, a child who remembers a woman who died in a delivery room — I took the explanation I was given, because the explanation let me keep going.
I told myself that was respect. That it was his grief and not my business.
It was not respect. Respect would have been asking one question in 2023 and taking the consequences.
Etta asked hers at six, in a function room, in front of forty-one people, in a dress, and she is the only person in this entire story who behaved well.
And Noelle, who is a set of dates in this account and who was a person, and who I have had described to me now by somebody who loved her.
She taught secondary geography. She was, by her sister’s account, extremely funny and completely disorganised, and she once drove to a wedding in Kelsmere with the wrong shoes and did the whole day in trainers and did not care.
She wrote to Iain eleven times in those fourteen months. Rhiannon has copies of four, because Noelle did them on her laptop first.
They are not what I expected. They are not begging and they are not furious. They are mostly about Etta — what she was doing, what she was saying — and they read like a woman writing to somebody she still thought she was going to sort it out with.
The last one is from the July of 2022, four weeks before the coast road, and it ends with a line about coming up in the October to talk about school places.
She was planning the October.
And what I have not been able to stop doing, since Rhiannon showed me that page, is the other version. The October. Etta at three and a half in a kitchen with two parents arguing about a school, all of them alive, all of it ordinary and fixable.
Fourteen months is nothing. That is the thing nobody says about this. The whole of it, the entire tragedy, is fourteen months of two adults not picking up a telephone.
Where things are.
We are still married. I said that out loud to Dr Sallow in the March and it sounded like a confession.
It is not a triumphant marriage and it is not a forgiveness story. It is two people in a house doing a great deal of admin about a child, and going to a room on Thursdays, and being polite in a way that is slowly getting less careful.
He is in treatment for the thing he would not name for four years, which is not grief, or not only. He started in the January.
I have told him, once, calmly, that if he ever again tells that child that something she remembers did not happen, I will go, and I will go to Rhiannon’s, and Etta will know exactly why. He did not argue.
Rhiannon comes on the first Sunday of the month. Iain leaves the house for the first hour, which was Dr Sallow’s idea and which everyone hated and which works.
Iain’s mother, Sheena, has not spoken to me since the October. She says I had no business. She also, it turns out, knew all of it, and posted the Christmas cards back herself, twice. I have decided I can live without Sheena.
And our wedding photographs, which arrived in the November, four hundred and eleven of them, in a link.
I could not look at them for six weeks.
And when I did, I found the one.
The photographer had been doing the room from the side, and in one frame — number two hundred and six — there is the back of my dress on the floor, and Etta with her mouth at my ear, and my face turned slightly away from the camera.
You cannot see my expression. You can see my hand, which is on her back.
It is, technically, a lovely photograph. Two of my friends have commented on it.
And I have it printed, and it is in the drawer and not on the wall, and Dr Sallow knows I have it.
Because it is the only picture in existence of the exact eleven seconds in which that child handed a grown-up something she had been carrying on her own since she was three, and got it right, and was believed.
I will put it up eventually. Not yet.
And the last thing.
In the June, Etta turned seven, and we went to Tarrow Bay for the weekend, which is the first time she has been to the house where her mother lived.
Rhiannon had not made a thing of it. There was a cake and there was a beach and there was a plastic bucket.
And at some point on the Saturday afternoon Etta went upstairs on her own and did not come down for about ten minutes, and I went up, because I am the one who goes up.
She was sitting on the floor of the back bedroom with the wardrobe open and the blue coat in her lap.
Not crying. Sitting.
And she had her face down in it, the way you do with a jumper, and she was breathing.
And when she heard me she looked up and she did not look caught, which is the thing I noticed and which I nearly said something stupid about.
She said: “It doesn’t smell of anything.”
And I said no, darling. It’s been in a box a long time.
And she thought about that, and then she put it back on the hanger herself, quite carefully, and did the one toggle it still has.
And then she said:
“I still remember it though.”
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- My sister told me, “Don’t come to my wedding—my husband is a senior Navy officer, and you’ll embarrass us,” so I said nothing and quietly stepped away from the expenses I had been covering; a week later, when the vendors began calling her about unpaid balances, she finally realized who had actually been funding her perfect day
- THE QUEEN’S RECKONING
And I said I know.
And she said: “I know you know. You’re the one I told.”
FULL STORY on the next page.
