“Unlike you.”
And beside me, in the cot, his daughter made a small noise in her sleep.
“You still there?”
“Yes.”
“You always wanted a family,” he said. “Thought you might enjoy watching me finally get one.”
Two losses. Nineteen months of appointments. Nights on a bathroom floor at three in the morning. A husband who used the word broken in an argument in 2023 and never took it back, and a mother-in-law who said barren at a lunch table in front of six people and laughed as though it were affectionate.
And Ondine Marr — his assistant, and then rather more than his assistant — who sent flowers to my flat eleven days after the decree with a card that said: Some women are chosen.
What none of them knew was that four days before that divorce became final, I sat on the edge of a bath and looked at a test.
