He doesn’t deserve anyone.
Fifty-Two
January 8
Ffion
For months into her pregnancy, Ffion didn’t look at her stomach. She closed her eyes in the shower, pulled baggy clothes over still-damp skin to avoid catching sight of herself in the mirror. The waistband of her school skirt was forced a little higher each day, until the hem was indecent enough for her form teacher to pass comment. After that, Ffion left the zip undone, extending the button with a hair band and letting her oversized jumper fall over the top.
Dad didn’t look at her stomach either. In fact, he rarely looked at Ffion at all, and her heart ached with unhappiness. She wished they could talk about it, but she’d agreed with Dad’s insistence that if the baby was to be brought up as his and Elen’s, it would be best for them all to behave from the outset as if that really were the case. The three of them moved around the house in an uneasy silence, Ffion’s belly the elephant in the room. As Ffion’s clothes grew baggier, so did Elen’s, hidden beneath big coats on her rare forays to the shops.
“We’re just spending time as a family,” she said, explaining away her sudden retreat from village life. No one questioned it. Her husband was dying—why wouldn’t they hide themselves away?
When Ffion was twenty weeks pregnant, she felt a tremor beneath her jumper, like a moth trapped between cupped fingers. She gasped, instinctively putting her hands to her stomach, and Elen looked up in alarm. “Do you have a pain?”
“No, I…” It happened again. Like the flip of your tummy on a roller coaster.
Realization spread a smile across Elen’s face. “The baby’s moving, isn’t it?”
Ffion’s eyes were wide with wonder, her hands creeping across her bump. She splayed her fingers wide, realizing for the first time how taut her skin was, how heavy and solid the bump was beneath. “Shhh,” she murmured, and the moth fell quiet. Elen crouched beside her, slotting her own hands around Ffion’s, and the two of them waited for more signs of life.
“Does it really hurt?” Ffion asked her mam. She’d read the books Elen had bought, even watched that awful video in school, but she still found it hard to comprehend that—in a matter of weeks—there would be an actual baby coming out of her. “Like,really?”
Elen stood, kissing her daughter fiercely on the forehead. “You know the best antidote to pain?”
Ffion remembered the woman on the video. “Is it an epidural?”
Elen laughed. “It’s love, Ffion Morgan. Love is the answer to everything.”
Ffion keeps the throttle on full, the motorboat bounding forward to meet each wave. Seren, where are you? she thinks. Leo swings the searchlight from left to right, the snow like shoals of fish in the beam, twisting in the wind.
Love is the answer to everything.
More than sixteen years ago, Mam had taken Ffion’s hand—just when Ffion was thinkingNo more, I can’t take any more—and placed it between Ffion’s own legs, and amazement had won over revulsion when she had felt her baby crowning.
“One more push,” Mam said. The pain tore Ffion in two, but the house was still full of condolence cards, and she felt the love come off them in waves. People loved Dad—loved them all—enough to send flowers, send cards. And love was the antidote to pain.
Seren slipped out and into Mam’s hands, and in a single heartbeat, she was lying on Ffion’s chest, her mouth open in a cartoon wail. There was a moment when Ffion wanted to sayI’m keeping her, and she could have sworn the same thought passed across Mam’s eyes too. But they had made a plan, and besides, the thought of being a mother was too terrifying, too impossible to comprehend. It would be better for the baby to hand her over, wouldn’t it? It would be easier.
Wouldn’t it?
“Do you want to try to feed her?” Mam was gentle, encouraging, but Ffion turned away.
“Take her.”
“You can—”
“Take her!”
When Ffion’s milk came in, it felt like a betrayal. She sat hunched in the bath, her breasts throbbing and the taps running to block out the sound of her baby—no, hersister—crying downstairs, taking the bottle from Mam. It was better this way.
Wasn’t it?
A flash of lightning illuminates the sky.
“There!” Leo points. The silhouette has already vanished back into the swirling white of the snowstorm, but not before Ffion saw it too. A boat. Buffeted first one way, then the other, wrenching and fighting, its mast snapped in two. She yanks on the wheel, turning west and willing the motorboat to go faster, Leo training the searchlight on the water.
Slowly, the anchored dinghy takes shape five hundred meters up ahead.