And I walked out into that car park with an empty baby seat over one arm and my daughter on my hip and one hundred and fourteen dollars of things she needed left on a belt behind me.
Rosamund did not follow me out. She stayed in the shop for about four minutes and then got a taxi, which I only know because of what came up on the card afterwards.
PART 3
Then I sat in the car for about four minutes with the engine off.
And then I rang a number I had not called in six years.
Vance & Hayes. My late father's private bank. A number I wrote on the inside back page of a notebook in 2019.
I have copied it into every phone I have owned since. Four phones. By hand, each time, from the notebook.
And I never once dialled it. Not in six years.
Not when we nearly lost the house deposit in 2022. Not when my mother was ill. Not on any of about four afternoons when ringing it would have been the obvious thing to do. I want somebody to sit with what it means that a woman copies a number across four phones over six years and never rings it.
I said: Teague. It's happening. Unlock everything.
And he went quiet.
About four seconds, which from that man is an extremely long time. He has been answering telephones for wealthy frightened people for about thirty years and that man does not pause.
He paused. For four seconds, on an encrypted line, in the middle of the afternoon.
I have thought since that he had been dreading that call for six years as much as I had been saving it up.
Then he said: your father set this trust up so that you would never be financially trapped, Sunniva. But you need to understand what happens if I release it.
I waited.
He said: your husband's commercial credit line is held through this division. Activating the master trust triggers an automatic debt review on linked facilities.
And then: if that happens, his company could be insolvent by morning.
And I said: unlock every dime.
Four words. In a car park, at about ten past four in the afternoon, to a man eleven hundred miles away who had been waiting six years for that telephone call and had hoped it would not come.
I want to be accurate about how that felt, because there is a version of this where I was shaking and there is a version where I was serene, and neither is true.
