Then in the January her grades fell off a cliff.
Not a slide. A cliff — a B, a D, and then two blanks in three weeks.
I found her crying over an empty test paper on a Tuesday afternoon and I knelt down beside the desk and asked her what was happening.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand and said: please don’t call my parents. They asked me not to cause any problems.
Nobody in that job can leave that sentence where it lies.
So I put a meeting in for the Thursday after school.
At four o’clock Etta sat down across from me and started crying before I had said one word, and then there were footsteps in the corridor.
The door opened.
And I could not get any air in, because the man standing in it was my husband.
I said: you?
Gethin did not look at me. He looked at Etta and he said her name, and it was the way you say the name of a child you have said it to a thousand times.
Etta is sixteen.
She was born four months after Iona.
PART 2
Everybody goes to the affair. I understand why, and it is not the thing.
There was an affair. It began in 2008 and it ended, as a relationship, in about 2012, and Rhoswen Brann has been a person my husband has an arrangement with for sixteen years.
He has seen Etta twice a month for most of her life. There is a bank transfer that goes out on the eleventh. He has been at a school play. I have found a photograph of him at a swimming pool in 2017 and I have looked at it perhaps two hundred times.
That is enormous. It is also not what I cannot get past, and it took me about five months to work out which one was which.
What I cannot get past is twelve days in a hospital.
During those twelve days they asked us about family history over and over.
Different people, different departments, sometimes twice in a day by two people who had not spoken to each other. Both sides. Anybody with anything. Any other children.
I answered every single time. I gave them my grandmother’s heart and my brother’s kidney and a cousin I have met four times.
And so did Gethin. He sat in those chairs and he answered, in a calm voice, and he was very good at it, and three separate nurses told me afterwards how steady he had been.
There was an entire half of a picture that he did not give them.
A second child. Alive. Four months younger than ours. Same father.
With her own health record sitting in a GP practice eleven miles away under a different surname, and a full set of the first four years of childhood in it.
He stood in that corridor for twelve days holding that.
And every single time somebody in a lanyard asked the question, he made the decision again.
He has been asked, since, by a solicitor, whether he ever came close to saying it.
