PART 2
Because he had forgotten something.
Before I became the quiet wife he wanted, I was a contract auditor.
Five years at Harrowgate and Vell, which is one of the most aggressive litigation firms in this city, going through the finances of men exactly like my husband for a living.
I gave it up in 2019 because he asked me to.
He said a Wrexham wife did not need to work. He said it at a dinner in front of his parents and his mother nodded, and I handed in my notice on the Monday, and I told myself for five years that it had been my decision.
He had never once asked what I actually used to do. He knew the name of the firm. He did not know what an auditor does.
And he was not careful.
When he locked me out of our money in a hurry, in a temper, on a Sunday night, he forgot that I had set up half the online banking in that house in 2018.
He left behind passwords. Transaction records going back four years. Invoices from three companies that exist on paper and nowhere else.
And a folder of emails between him and his mother.
The one I have read most is from the September. It is from Philippa and it is four lines long, and the second line is:
Starve her out financially and she’ll hand you custody to make it stop.
I did not confront them.
I did not beg, and I did not ring anybody, and I did not post anything anywhere.
I printed every single piece of it at the library, two pages at a time so the woman on the desk would not notice, and I put it in that folder under my mattress.
For three months I cleaned offices at night and slept on top of it.
And now, in that delivery room, a doctor was staring at my newborn as though he were looking at somebody who had come back from the dead.
I said: what’s wrong with him?
My voice came out wrong. It came out like somebody else’s.
And he looked up at me with tears standing on his lashes and he said:
Who is this baby’s father?
Cold went through me from the top down.
Because there is only one reason a doctor asks you that in that voice ten minutes after a birth, and I had read about it at three in the morning on a phone, and it is never good.
I said: Tobiah Wrexham.
And that doctor’s hands tightened on the blanket. I watched his knuckles change colour.
He said the name back. Quietly, to himself. Tobiah Wrexham.
At that exact moment the door swung open.
And my ex-husband walked in, smiling.
