PART 1
My ex-husband had made it very clear that I was no longer his problem.
So I gave birth on my own.
I had been awake since about two with pains I told myself were nothing, and by four I knew they were not nothing, and by half past I was in the car.
I drove myself to that hospital with one hand on the wheel and the other pressed flat against my stomach, shaking through every red light on the ring road, talking out loud to my baby and asking him to hold on for just a bit longer.
He could not.
He arrived at eleven minutes past six in the morning, about forty minutes after I came through the doors, and there was nobody in that room who knew my name before that morning.
Ten minutes after he was born, the doctor holding my son looked down into his face and went white.
And then he started to cry.
Not a tear. Properly. A man of about sixty in a blue gown, holding a newborn, with his shoulders going.
He said: this can’t be possible.
I did not understand a single word of it. I was soaked through to my hair and my hands would not stop and every part of me felt like it had been turned inside out and then back again.
Three months earlier my husband had slid divorce papers across our dining table.
His mother was standing behind him the way a queen stands behind somebody delivering a sentence. She had come round specifically. She had not taken her coat off.
I looked at the papers and I said: I’m pregnant.
Tobiah straightened the silver watch on his wrist — he does that when he is about to say something he has rehearsed — and said:
That’s extremely inconvenient.
And his mother smiled.
She said: don’t make yourself the victim, Alethea. Men like my son don’t stay tied to women who fall pregnant to get their hands on the money.
I laughed. I actually laughed, out loud, at that table, because it was too cruel to cry at and my body did not know what else to do with it.
I said: I never cared about your money.
And Philippa leaned in, close enough that I could smell her perfume, and said:
No. You just got very comfortable spending it.
Inside a week, he had frozen our joint account and cancelled my health cover.
And he had told everybody we knew that I had been unfaithful.
I found that out from a woman I used to have lunch with, who rang me on the Thursday to say she was sorry things had gone the way they had and that she hoped I was getting help.
It went round faster than I could answer it.
Friends stopped picking up. Doors closed. People who had stood up and toasted our wedding in 2018 looked at the floor when they passed me in the supermarket, and one of them physically turned her trolley round.
So I took whatever there was.
At night I cleaned offices on the industrial estate, from ten until two.
Before sunrise I edited legal transcripts online at the kitchen table, which paid by the page and paid badly.
In the daytime I folded towels in a hotel laundry until my ankles swelled up over the tops of my shoes and I had to go down a size and then back up two.
Every pound went on rent, on the appointments I now had to pay for, and into a small folder under my mattress.
PART 2
Because he had forgotten something.
Before I became the quiet wife he wanted, I was a contract auditor.
Five years at Harrowgate and Vell, which is one of the most aggressive litigation firms in this city, going through the finances of men exactly like my husband for a living.
I gave it up in 2019 because he asked me to.
He said a Wrexham wife did not need to work. He said it at a dinner in front of his parents and his mother nodded, and I handed in my notice on the Monday, and I told myself for five years that it had been my decision.
He had never once asked what I actually used to do. He knew the name of the firm. He did not know what an auditor does.
And he was not careful.
When he locked me out of our money in a hurry, in a temper, on a Sunday night, he forgot that I had set up half the online banking in that house in 2018.
He left behind passwords. Transaction records going back four years. Invoices from three companies that exist on paper and nowhere else.
And a folder of emails between him and his mother.
The one I have read most is from the September. It is from Philippa and it is four lines long, and the second line is:
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.
See more on the next page