I have seen her once since, at a petrol station on the Belgrave road in the August, and both of us pretended not to.
My daughter was born at twenty past four in the morning on the fourth of December, 2025.
Eleven days after that hearing. In a hospital in Marren, four miles from the building her mother had been ordered out of by five o’clock.
Her name is Nia. That took me about four seconds and it was the easiest thing I have ever decided.
Severin Marrow was in that building when she was born.
Not in the room. In a corridor. For six hours and eleven minutes, at sixty-nine years of age, on a plastic chair, with a cane across his knees.
That was his idea and not mine and I had told him twice he did not have to.
He has settled money on that child.
Properly. Through people. With the whole of it written down in four documents, none of it conditional on one single thing, and none of it capable of being taken back.
