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.
PART 3
He had not come to see his son.
I knew that before he opened his mouth, because he did not look at the baby. Not once. He looked at me, and at the room, and at the doctor, in that order.
He had come with an application.
It was in the inside pocket of his jacket and I could see the corner of it, because he had not bothered to put it away properly — he had been holding it in the lift.
An emergency application for custody.
A woman working three jobs. No health cover. No support network — the word is on page two. Who had just driven herself to a hospital, through red lights, at five in the morning, while in labour.
He was going to use the fact that I gave birth alone as evidence that I could not be trusted with the baby.
He made me alone. And then he came to the hospital at twenty past six in the morning to hold it against me.
