I have turned that over for a year and I have decided it is true, and that it is also the most self-serving true thing anybody has ever said to me.
Because he was not weighing our daughter against his secret.
He was weighing our daughter against himself in a corridor — against being a man who got to stand in a corridor — and he came down on his own side twelve days running, and every single time he told himself it was for her.
And he was probably right that I would have made him leave.
That is the part I cannot do anything with. He read me accurately.
I would have got up out of that chair and told my husband to get out of that hospital, and I would have done it in about four seconds, and I do not know to this day whether that would have made me right or made me the same as him.
PART 4
Now Etta.
Her grades collapsed in the January and the head of year had it down as a phone or a boyfriend, which is what it is eleven times out of twelve.
She had found out three weeks earlier.
Not from Gethin. Not from her mother.
From a photograph in her own house — one that had been in a drawer for years and that she had seen before and never looked at properly.
In the December she looked at it properly, and the reason she looked at it properly is the thing that has stayed with me.
It is a photograph of her father at about thirty, at somebody’s wedding, and there is a woman cropped out of the left-hand side of it.
Not cut. Folded. The print had been folded back and put in the drawer flat, and Etta had picked it up a hundred times and never opened the fold, and in the December she did.
I am in that photograph. It was my cousin’s wedding in 2004 and I am wearing green.
She did not recognise me from it. That is not what happened and it would be a better story if it were.
What happened is that a sixteen-year-old unfolded a photograph and understood, in about a second, that somebody in her house had folded it — and then she started pulling on the thread, and it took her forty minutes with a phone.
I have asked myself who folded it.
It was not Rhoswen; she has told me she has never seen that photograph and I believe her, because she asked me to describe it.
He folded it. My husband folded a photograph of his own wife and put it in another woman’s drawer, sixteen years ago, and that is the single most Gethin Devlin act in this entire account.
He did not throw it away. He did not keep a clean one. He folded it so that both things could be true in the same drawer.
She had worked out who her father’s other family was, and then she had gone looking, and it took a sixteen-year-old with a phone about forty minutes.
So for three weeks that child came into my English class four times a week knowing exactly whose classroom she was sitting in.
She knew my daughter’s name. She knew what she had died of, which is to say she knew that nobody knew.
She had seen a photograph of Iona at eight and she had looked at her own face.
Sixteen years old. Three weeks. On her own, in a room with me, four times a week.
And she still put books on my desk.
There are three of them still in my house and I have not been able to do anything with them. One of them has a torn corner of paper in the front with one line of handwriting on it and I am not going to write the line down.
When I knelt beside her desk on that Tuesday and asked what was happening, the only thing she said was: please don’t call my parents, they asked me not to cause any problems.
I thought that was about her marks.
I want to say what I actually did with that sentence, because it is the only competent thing I did in this whole business and it is also the thing that blew it all up.
I did not accept it. I did not say all right, I won’t and let her go, which is what a tired teacher does at the end of a Tuesday.
I sat on that floor beside her desk and said: Etta, if there’s a reason I shouldn’t call them, you can tell me and it doesn’t leave this room unless it has to.
And she said nothing for about eleven seconds.
Eleven seconds. I counted them afterwards, over and over, in the car.
That child sat there with the entire thing in her mouth and decided not to hand it to me — because she had worked out, at sixteen, that it would land on me and not on him.
She was protecting me. That is what those eleven seconds were.
And then she said the line about not causing problems, and I said all right, and I booked the meeting, and I put a note in the system with her father’s name on it exactly as it appears on her file.
Which is Devlin. Not Brann.
