by Kate Hewitt
‘Believe me, it happened.’
I must sound rather grim for Will cocks his head and asks gently, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Do I? How would I even begin to explain? And yet I know if I don’t, I’ll have missed an opportunity and, worse, I’ll have hurt Will. He’s told me some of the secrets of his past – an abusive father, an absentee mother, the uncle with stomach cancer who stepped in, and his own rebellion in the teenaged years that was even more defiant and dangerous than mine. None of that was easy for him to share, and yet this feels like something else entirely.
‘It’s complicated,’ I say. I’ve already told him a lot about me – my parents’ divorce, my disastrous sixth form, and even my abortion. He was understanding about it all, but this…
How could I tell him that I have a biological daughter somewhere, except I really don’t? That I held her and loved her and had to let her go? Four years on, my own actions – wanting to keep Alice, talking to that lawyer – are a tangled mix of justifiable and completely crazy. I have no idea how Will would respond to any of it.
And yet if I don’t tell him… what does that say about us? Three months in and I feel good about our relationship. I feel hopeful. Will this torpedo it before it gets off the ground? Or will keeping this secret be the thing that sends it off the rails?
‘Try me,’ Will says with a smile. He squeezes my knee.
I take a deep breath, let it out. ‘I had a best friend,’ I begin slowly. ‘Ever since we started secondary. She was like a sister to me…’ Just saying that much hurts. Over the last four years, I’ve chosen to cast Milly as a villainess, the manipulative friend that took me for granted and then used me, but that narrative falls apart as soon as I think about her properly. Remember how kind she was, how we did everything together. How I was the one who offered to donate. If anyone manipulated anyone, it was me.
‘And what happened?’ Will asks gently, and I tell him, in halting, painstaking sentences, explaining about her infertility, and then my part, and Jack’s as well, in creating Alice. Will’s forehead crinkles as he listens. ‘So you and your boyfriend donated the egg and sperm? Wasn’t that a bit…’
‘We weren’t dating at the start. That happened afterward.’ Sometimes, when I remember my time with Jack, it feels like looking back on a hazy dream. Did that really happen? I knew all along, whether I wanted to admit it or not, that it was never going to last. And I don’t miss Jack the way I miss Milly. Not a bit.
‘So how did you fall out?’
‘After Alice was born…’ I stop, make myself start again. ‘Milly had trouble coping. She was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and she ended up leaving for a few weeks, while I took care of Alice.’ And so I tell him, slowly, painfully, how I fell in love with Alice – and how I tried to take her away.
When I’ve finished, Will sits back, absorbing all I’ve said. I stare at him fearfully, afraid he’ll judge me: What on earth were you thinking, Anna? Are you insane?
Then he turns to me. ‘That must have been so tough,’ he says, and it’s enough to make tears come to my eyes. He understands. He’s not judging.
‘Yes, it was,’ I manage, and then Will takes me into his arms. ‘It’s the hardest thing that’s ever happened to me.’ Which is saying something.
He holds me for a moment as he strokes my hair, and I relax into his embrace, into having him know this about me and be okay with it. It feels like a big step – the biggest we’ve taken so far – and it also feels good. It’s a relief, not to carry this by myself. To have it all be known.
‘So what are you going to do about the text?’ Will finally asks.
‘I’m going to ignore it. If she’d said something different, something more real…’
‘Perhaps she’s planning to, after she makes sure you’re still at the same number. I can understand her not wanting to write some heartfelt message when a stranger might receive it.’
I’ve thought of that, but I don’t think it’s the case. I’m not willing to take the risk that it is. ‘She could have said that, then,’ I counter. ‘Something like “just checking this is your number – I wanted to reach out” or something.’
‘True.’
One thing about Will is, he doesn’t push. He’s content to let me come to my own conclusions, make my own decisions, and yet right now I crave certainties. I want someone to tell me what the right thing to do is, to know.
‘I feel as if responding to this text will open that Pandora’s box up inside of me,’ I say slowly. ‘And everything will fly out.’ All the resentment, all the hurt, all the anger, all the grief. I’ve just got my life on a pleasant, even keel. I don’t want to upend it again, and for what?
‘Fair enough,’ Will says. ‘If she has something important to say, she’ll try again.’
I reassure myself that that is the case, but Milly’s text still niggles at me as I head to work on Monday. We’re planning a splashy fundraiser at a luxury hotel at Christmastime, and it’s taking all my energy and focus. I can’t afford to waste time thinking about Milly, and what she might want from me this time.
And yet I do think about her. As I am ordering flowers for the event, or filling in a spreadsheet, or answering calls from donors, I am thinking of her and I am remembering. It’s as if this one simple text has stirred the waters that have been swirling underneath all along, and random memories come floating up to the surface.
I remember walking home from school in year seven, sharing a packet of crisps, our shoulders nudging each other. I remember going as each other’s dates to the sixth-form ball, and having a blast.
But then I remember other things, things I’d forgotten – overhearing Milly talking to her flatmate a few months after I’d started living with them. Her friend had been complaining about me – and in retrospect I remember being a bit of a flake, distant and withdrawn. Milly’s response stays with me now – She’s not that bad, said in a half-hearted voice. I remember Milly barely reacting when I told her I’d been fired, how she had much preferred talking about herself and her bump.
All these memories jostle for space in my mind, and they bring out the worst in me. I’m irritable at work, and restless with Will. Everyone notices, and Cara, the other person who works in my department, asks me if anything is wrong. Will backs off a bit, to give me some space, he said, and I don’t blame him. Whether it’s my fault or Milly’s, she’s not good for me. Remembering our friendship is not good for me.
And so, two weeks after she sent that first text, I finally reply. Sorry, I don’t recognise your number. I think you have the wrong person.
After I send the text, I toss the phone aside and draw my knees up to my chest. I feel a wave of relief even as I fight the urge to burst into tears. At least now it’s done.
Or at least I thought it was – until a few days later, when the doorbell of my flat rings.
‘Anna?’ Through the intercom, Milly’s voice sounds anxious and urgent, and shocks me to the core. She came to my flat? I say nothing, because I have no words. ‘Anna? Is that you?’ Milly’s voice breaks. ‘Please, if it is, let me up. I have to talk to you. It’s important.’ Her voice hitches. ‘It’s about Alice.’
Twenty-Five
Milly
It started with little things, things so small I thought I was crazy even to notice them. I thought I was being the paranoid, over-the-top helicopter mum, but I wasn’t.
First it was Alice’s second eye test, which she failed. Her vision was worse than anyone had realised, least of all me. After a moment of feeling wrong-footed, as if I should have caught something that I didn’t, I readjusted my expectations. Alice got glasses. They had pink frames and she loved them, and best of all, she loved seeing properly.
‘Everything is so clear, Mummy!’ she exclaimed, her face full of joy that made me smile even as it tore at my heart. How had she felt before she’d got them? Why had she never said anything?
‘I feel guilty for not realising she could
n’t actually see very well,’ I told my mum one Saturday afternoon in July. We were sitting in their garden, a blanket over my mum’s knees because she got cold easily, even in the drowsy summer heat.
‘But she’s only four, and why would you think she couldn’t? They have these checks in preschools for a reason, Milly, and you caught it before she started school.’ She reached over to pat my knee. ‘You can’t beat yourself up over these things, Milly. Motherhood comes with so much guilt as it is. She’s fine now. That’s the important thing.’
And I let myself believe her. Like I told Matt, there were worse things than glasses.
But then I began to notice other things. Alice started waking up again at night, the way she had as a baby. I put it down to nerves about starting school. Then, one morning, she told me she couldn’t put on her shoes.
We were running late for preschool, and I fought a sense of impatience as I kept my voice cheerful. ‘Come on, darling, you can do it. You’ve done it before, loads of times.’
‘I can’t, Mummy.’ She thrust her lower lip out, the picture of stubbornness, so unlike her usually easy-going nature.
‘Alice…’ I stared at her in exasperation, and she stared back. A stand-off, and meanwhile the clock was ticking. ‘Fine, I’ll do it today,’ I said, quickly jamming her feet into the pink Velcro trainers. ‘But you do it tomorrow, all right?’
‘It’s hard.’ Her lip wobbled.
‘Take your time, then. There’s no need to rush. I know you can do this, darling.’ I gave her a quick kiss on top of her head and promptly forgot about the whole thing, chalking it up as just one more of those everyday moments with a four-year-old. Until it happened again.
The next day, about to go out to a local farm park, one of her favourites, and she sat on the bottom stair, resolutely shaking her head.
‘I can’t.’
‘Alice…’ I was at a loss. Alice had been able to put on her own shoes for months. Why this regression, this insistence? And did it really matter if I put on her shoes for her?
In the world of mothering, it’s so easy to feel judged. The telling silence, the raised eyebrow in the preschool cloakroom. Oh, Alice isn’t reading yet? You brought in iced party rings for a snack? I try not to participate in or even care about that awful race, but it’s hard not to justify and explain. She knows her letter sounds. It was just once for a treat.
So now, faced with the battle of the shoes, I didn’t know whether I should have given in or fought till she’s put them on. What was the right thing to do? Who could tell me?
I ended up surfing parenting forums online, hoping for some titbit of wisdom, and found on a pages-long thread about how four-year-olds should be able to put on shoes themselves, and if you do it for them, you’re teaching them to be lazy. A child psychologist weighed in: This is a skill most four-year-olds should be able to master. Look at what the underlying issue is.
So the next time, I was ready. When Alice told me she couldn’t do it, I knelt down to her, eye-level, and asked her gently what she was really afraid of.
‘Do you not want to go to preschool, darling?’ She stared at me blankly. ‘Are you worried about something?
She shook her head. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Let me see you try.’
She glared at me in frustration, and then she began to fumble with her shoe. I couldn’t help but feel she was doing it deliberately; she was really not this clumsy. She couldn’t have been.
I waited, patient smile in place, as Alice continued to ineffectually push her foot into the shoe, her fingers fumbling with the Velcro straps. Then, to my surprise, she let out a groan of frustration and threw the shoe across the room.
‘Alice!’ In my shock, my voice came out in a scolding tone of censure.
‘I can’t do it! I told you I can’t!’ she screamed, and then she half-ran, half-stumbled upstairs and slammed her bedroom door as hard as she could. I stood there for a moment, completely appalled and perplexed. Alice had never behaved like that before, not even as a tantrumming toddler. What was going on?
‘She’s most likely just going through a phase,’ Matt told me that evening, when I relayed the whole experience after Alice was in bed. ‘Remember when she was two, and she insisted on doing everything herself? And I mean everything.’ Matt smiled in memory, but I was not so easily reassured.
‘This felt different, Matt.’
‘How so?’
‘Because it was as if she really couldn’t.’
‘She believed she couldn’t.’
‘It was more than that.’
Matt didn’t look convinced, and I couldn’t explain it any better.
‘Maybe she’s having a bit of a regression,’ he said. ‘Because of starting school. Isn’t that a thing with children?’
‘Yes…’ And so I told myself that’s what it was, that Alice would not be refusing to put on her shoes when she was seven or ten or twelve. How little I knew. How much I wanted to believe.
In August we went on holiday to Cornwall, the same cottage we’d rented for the last few years, starting when I’d been pregnant and we’d dreamed of a future, a family. We spent a lovely week frolicking on the beach, playing in rock pools and building sandcastles. Most of the time Alice didn’t need to wear shoes. Then, the night before we left, Alice had a seizure.
It was the most shocking thing, as if I’d been electrified, every sense put on high alert. I’d come into her room to help her change into her pyjamas, and she was lying on the floor, staring straight ahead, spittle dribbling from her mouth, her whole body jerking.
‘Alice… Alice!’ The note of raw terror in my voice sent Matt sprinting upstairs.
‘What…’
‘I think she’s having a seizure.’ I could hardly believe I was saying the words. ‘What do we do?’ I turned to Matt, craving some kind of reassurance. ‘What do we do?’
‘I don’t know. I think… in a seizure aren’t you just supposed to leave them to it? They’ll come out of it when…’ He gulped. ‘When they can.’
The next three and a half minutes felt like the longest of our lives. Matt looked up seizures on his phone and read that we should put Alice on her side, to help her breathe, so we did that while murmuring encouragements and endearments to her, even though it was impossible to know if she could hear us.
It was agonising to see her that way, so out of control, so in need, and yet there was nothing we could do. It went against every instinct I’d ever had.
Then, finally, her limbs relaxed and slowly her gaze came into focus. She stared at us in confusion, and then in fear.
‘What… what happened?’
‘You had a little scare, darling,’ I said, only just managing to keep my voice from trembling as hers was. ‘But you’re all right now.’
The day we got back to Bristol, I took her to the GP.
‘Febrile seizures are surprisingly common in children,’ he told us, smiling in sympathy. Alice looked very little in the chair next to his desk; her feet didn’t even touch the floor. ‘Although they can be quite frightening.’
‘This wasn’t due to a fever.’ I glanced at Alice, not wanting her to hear this whole conversation. ‘She wasn’t ill.’
‘I can request an EEG, of course, if she has another one.’
I gritted my teeth, because our GP has always been a bit too easy-going. I felt in my gut that something was wrong, and he wanted to take the ‘let’s wait and see’ approach.
As it turned out, we didn’t have long to wait. Alice had another seizure the following week, and the GP booked her in for the promised EEG, which gave no answers except that she didn’t have epilepsy.
As much of a relief as that was, the not knowing was making me anxious. I felt as if I were becoming paranoid, seeing everything as a symptom.
‘You need to relax, Milly,’ Matt told me, which was saying something considering how overprotective he usually was. ‘So she’s stopped liking broccoli. It doesn’t mean anything.’<
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I rolled my eyes at him, because it wasn’t that that was worrying me. It was everything else – the restless nights, the refusal to put on her shoes, the increased clumsiness, the way she’d sometimes forget a word, right in the middle of a sentence, and stare at me blankly, until I gently filled it in and she’d give me a beaming smile. The feeling, as we walked to school for her first day of reception in early September, that she wasn’t the same Alice I knew and loved.
It hit me suddenly, as I watched her walk in front of me. It had happened so gradually, all summer long, that I hadn’t taken it all in, but watching her walk so slowly and carefully down the pavement, even limping a little, as she dragged one foot slightly behind the other, I realised Alice was different. She’d changed, more than I’d ever seen or suspected and I knew in that moment that something really was wrong.
I made an appointment for the GP the next day, by myself, so I could talk honestly, without scaring Alice.
‘She’s changed, over the last few months, and I’m worried.’
The GP gave me a smile of rather indulgent sympathy. ‘Changed how?’
‘She’s slower, less confident. She trips or bumps into things more, and she can’t do simple tasks such as putting on her shoes.’ Or taking off her clothes, or even brushing her teeth. With a ripple of alarm, I realised, as I sat there, just how much I’d started doing things for her, because she said she couldn’t, and because it was easier.
That first pitched battle over the shoes felt like a long time ago. I’d given in without even acknowledging that I was doing it – a lot, moment by moment, day by day.
‘Children this age often exhibit a lack of self-confidence, a period of regression, especially when they’re starting school,’ the GP reassured me. ‘It’s fairly normal for them to say they are unable to complete tasks they were able to do previously.’
‘It’s not that.’ My voice came out firm, even hard. Alice wasn’t limping down the street because of a problem with her self-confidence. ‘It’s physical,’ I told him steadily. ‘Not emotional.’
