That call exists. She reminded me of it in the December, laughing, as an example of me being soft about them.
And on the eighth I went and bought a sling.
Not for the trip generally. I had a sling. I bought a second one because the first is the wrong colour for a thing and because I wanted to be able to carry them both and still have a hand free.
And I have told myself that was practical, and it was.
And I stood in that terminal for fifty minutes with a phone in the hand it freed up.
When I found out.
The twenty-third of April, 2025.
The girls were two and a half weeks old.
A woman called Shauna who works that ship and who went to school with my cousin sent me four messages and then rang me, because she had been sitting on it for about a fortnight and could not do it any more.
And she told me the whole of it. The name, how long, where they went at the ports.
And I said thank you, and I said I would not say where it had come from, and I have kept that.
And then I put the phone down and fed my daughters.
Eleven weeks.
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The twenty-third of April to the eleventh of July.
And in all of that time I did not say one word to that man about it.
And he rang about twice a week. And I talked to him about the girls and about the health visitor and about his mother’s knee.
And in the June he sent a photograph of himself on a deck somewhere and I sent one back of the twins on the mat.
Eleven weeks of being perfectly normal with a man on a ship.
Why I waited.
Because I could have done it in April, on the telephone, in four minutes, and he would have been eleven hundred miles away and nothing would have happened.
He would have said what he said in that terminal, more or less, into a phone, and then he would have come home in July and it would have been a thing between the two of us in a kitchen.
And I wanted it in front of his mother.
That is the whole of it and I have had fifteen months and I can say it plainly now.
