He said yes, twice.
Once on the third day, in the corridor, when a registrar asked him directly whether there were any other children in the family and he said no, and then stood there for about a minute afterwards.
And once on the tenth day, at about four in the morning, when he was alone with Iona while I was asleep down the hall, and he says he had decided to tell me when I woke up.
I did wake up. He brought me a coffee at about seven and asked whether I had slept.
That is the part people miss and it is the whole of it. It was not one moment of panic on the first afternoon.
It was hour by hour, for twelve days, while I slept in a chair beside our daughter with my coat over me.
I have gone through those twelve days properly, with a notebook, which is a thing I would recommend to nobody.
Day four he went home for eight hours.
Day seven he was gone from about two until seven in the evening and came back with a bag of things from the house that I had not asked for and did not need — a jumper of mine, a phone charger we already had, a book.
Day nine there was a period in the afternoon where I could not find him for about ninety minutes and he said afterwards that he had been in the chapel, and there is a chapel, and he may well have been.
I do not know what any of those hours were. I am never going to know and I have stopped needing to.
What I know is that on day seven, Etta Brann was seven years old and living eleven miles away, and somebody was looking after her, and it was not her mother, because Rhoswen has told me she was working nights that month.
I asked her, at the second meeting, whether Gethin had come to her house during those twelve days.
She said she would rather not answer that.
That is the answer. That is how people answer a thing that has a yes in it, and she knew I would know, and I think she was being as kind as it was possible for her to be.
PART 3
I asked the question that everybody asks.
I asked it of Dr Adisa, in a room, in the February, eight years after the fact, because I found out she was still at that hospital and I wrote to her and she agreed to see me.
She had the file. She had read it again before I came, which she did not have to do.
I asked her whether it would have made any difference.
She said no.
She said it plainly, without hedging, and then she took twenty minutes to explain why — what they had been looking for, what it was not, and why a sibling’s records from the first four years of life would not have moved anything.
