I did my midwife appointments under Halliday. I registered at a different practice. I did not put one thing on the internet, not one photograph, for eight months, which if you are thirty-four is a form of disappearing.
And I worked. I did the books for a landscaping firm and a garage from that kitchen table until I was thirty-eight weeks, because I was not going to touch a penny of the trust while a divorce was live and because Ines told me, in exactly these words: “Take nothing you’d have to explain.”
It was the loneliest eight months of my life and it was the correct eight months, and both of those are true and I do not rank them.
My grandmother.
Hester Halliday was eighty-six when she died in the August of 2024. She ran a plant hire business in Brightwater for forty-one years and she did her own books until she was eighty.
