Philippa has not been in touch. I do not expect her to be.
Tobiah sees his son twice a month, supervised for now, and he has not missed one. He has stopped dyeing his hair. The white came through in about eleven weeks.
He has had a DNA test. He has met Leander four times, in a café, with nobody else there, and I have never asked what they talk about.
PART 5
Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
I did not ring my mother.
We have not spoken since the wedding. She came to it and she sat at the back and she left before the speeches, and the week before, at her kitchen table, she had told me exactly what that family was — very plainly, in about four sentences — and I had told her she was jealous and that she had never liked anything that was mine.
I had her number the entire way to that hospital.
I had it through three months of cleaning offices at night on an industrial estate with my ankles swelling over my shoes.
I had it when I was printing emails two pages at a time at a library so the woman on the desk would not notice.
And I would rather drive myself through red lights on the ring road at five in the morning, in labour, on my own, than make one phone call to a woman who was going to say she had told me so.
That is what I actually did.
They froze my account. They cancelled my insurance. They told my friends I had cheated.
They did not cut the line to my mother. I did that myself, in 2018, over a kitchen table, because she was right and I could not stand it.
Everybody who has heard this story says the same thing. That I was so strong, doing it all on my own.
I was not strong. I was proud, and those are two different things, and the second one nearly cost me my son.
Because the whole of Tobiah’s application — the whole of it, page two, no support network — rested on one fact, and it was a fact I built myself.
If my mother had been in that delivery room, there was no application.
She would have been the support network. It would have been one sentence on a form and there would have been nothing for him to walk in with.
