But it is the thing that stops me from making her simple, and I have four children who are going to need their grandmother to not be simple.
And the eight years I have not described, which everybody skips to get to the lawn.
They were born in the September of 2017, at thirty-one weeks, and were in hospital for seven and five and five and three weeks respectively, in that order, which I can still say faster than my own phone number.
My mother moved in for fourteen months. My sister did Tuesdays and Thursdays for two years.
I started the business in the January of 2019 at a kitchen table at nine o’clock at night because the only hours I had were after seven, and that is the entire origin story that gets written up in profiles as drive.
It was not drive. It was four of them and no second adult and a calculation about nursery fees that did not work out, and a decision that if I was going to be exhausted either way I would rather be exhausted on my own terms.
And here is the part that matters for the rest of this.
By the March of 2021, when I could have found him in an afternoon, I had already built the whole of my life round his absence. The house, the hours, the childcare, the shape of my week, the story the four of them had about themselves.
Finding him would not have added a father. It would have taken a brick out of a wall I had spent four years building without him, and I knew it, and I did not want to find out which brick.
That is not the same as protecting them. I have stopped letting people tell me it was.
Camille.
She did not marry him.
That was decided in the February and it was her decision and she has been clear that it was not about the children.
She said, in a car park in the March, that she could get her head round four children. What she could not get her head round was that she had been with a man for three years and had never once been told there had been a wife who was pregnant.
He had told her the marriage ended because they wanted different things.
She rings me about once a month. We are not friends. We are two women who were in the same hallway on the twenty-fifth of December and who both found out something that afternoon, and there is a specific kind of sentence that only the two of us can say to each other.
And the scan photograph, which came out of that bureau on Christmas Day and which is now in my house.
Loretta gave it to me in the June. Not the letter — she has kept the letter, and I have let her, and I do not entirely know why either of us agreed to that.
The photograph is creased across one corner from being in a drawer for eight and a half years and it has her thumbprint worn into the bottom left of it, which you can see if you hold it up, because she held it the same way every September.
I had the original. That is the thing people always get wrong when I tell them this.
I was not sending him my only copy in 2017 — I had three prints and I sent one, because I was twenty-nine and frightened and I thought a photograph would do what a phone call could not.
So there are two of that image in the world now and I have both, and one of them lived in my house in a box with their hospital bands, and the other one lived in a drawer forty minutes from where their father was asleep.
They are identical. Same four shapes, same annotation down the side in the sonographer’s handwriting.
And the only difference between them, after eight and a half years, is that one is creased and worn where somebody held it.
