And in the complaint, in the May of 2023, he wrote that I had been "receiving treatment for mental health difficulties associated with infertility", which is a sentence constructed to be almost true: I saw a counsellor at that clinic eleven times in 2019, as they recommend, as most people do, and I declared precisely nothing because there is nothing to declare.
He turned the eleven appointments where I was looked after into the thing that took my clinics away.
What Rhett did afterwards.
He has not apologised and he is not going to and I have stopped waiting for the scene where he does.
The complaint is not in itself a criminal matter and nobody is going to prosecute him for it, which took me about four months to accept.
What has actually happened to him is civil and slow and boring and extremely effective.
The settlement went. The house is going. There is a costs order against him from the February that he cannot pay, and a second claim that Hollis says will be listed next year.
He has moved to Brackwater and is living in a rented flat with Yvie and that boy, and I know those facts only because they are in the papers.
And the thing I have had to make peace with is that he is forty-two, and he is not going to look at any of this and understand it. He is going to understand it as a thing that was done to him.
The corridor.
One more thing about that day, because people always want the moment.
It was not satisfying.
I have thought about it a great deal and I would not have it again.
That was a paediatric corridor on a Wednesday afternoon. There were eleven people in that waiting area and two of them were children in wheelchairs, and one family had come out of a conversation I know the shape of.
And in the middle of it a man said the word infertile at volume about a colleague of theirs, and a bottle broke, and a lot of frightened people had to watch two adults have a divorce in front of them.
The sister on that floor is called Bernadine and she is sixty and she has worked there twenty-two years, and she got everybody moved and the floor cleared inside about ninety seconds, and then she came and found me in the sluice and said: "Right. Breathe."
That is what actually happened. There was no applause. There was a woman of sixty with a mop.
And I went to my meeting, eleven minutes late, and did not say why.
What I did not do.
I did not look at that child's notes.
I want that written down because it is the only thing in this entire account that I am proud of without qualification.
He was on the system. I could have had his record open in about nine seconds from any terminal in that building, and I would have been able to tell you his birth weight and his blood group and who was at the delivery.
Thirty-one per cent of me wanted to.
And I have access to that system because sick children need me to have it, and the day I use it for anything else is the day the complaint becomes true.
So I did not, and I am going to keep not doing it, and when he is eighteen there will be an audit trail with my staff number nowhere on it.
And my sister Wren, who did one thing in 2023 that I have never properly thanked her for.
In the July of that year, six weeks in, she drove to Ellery and sat in my kitchen and asked me straight out whether I thought Rhett had made the complaint.
And I said no.
And she said: "Petra. Look at me and say that again."
And I said no again, and I held her eye while I did it, because I am extremely good at that and always have been.
And she did not argue. She said, "Okay," and made the tea, and then she said one thing before she left, which I dismissed at the time as sisters being sisters.
She said: "Right. Well. Write down the date you decided that, because you'll want to know it later."
I thought she was being dramatic.
