Chapter 2 - What He Was Looking At
I should explain what he saw.
Our daughter had been born with a patch of white hair at the front of her head. Not blonde — white. A clean, deliberate-looking streak about two fingers wide, sitting just above her forehead and slightly off to the left.
Her eyes are a blue that doesn't quite match any other baby's I'd ever seen. Very pale, almost glassy-bright, and the left one is a faintly different shade from the right, something you only notice if you're looking closely.
I'd first noticed the hair at six that morning and thought it was the single most beautiful thing I'd ever seen on another human being. I remember lying there thinking, we are going to have to fight the entire world off this child, and meaning it as pure, fierce love.
She'd had her newborn hearing screening at five past nine that morning, before Rhys had even arrived at the hospital.
She'd passed on the right ear.
She had not passed on the left. The technician doing the test told me, in that flat, professionally soothing tone they're all trained to use, that plenty of babies don't pass the first time because of leftover fluid in the ear canal, and that they'd simply repeat the test in a day or two, and that it was extremely common, and not to worry.
I hadn't mentioned any of it to Rhys yet. It was on my mental list of things to tell him after he'd finally held her.
The door opened at twenty past eleven.
A woman stepped inside.
She was in her sixties. Small, dressed in a good, well-kept coat, holding her handbag in both hands in front of her body like it was some kind of shield. Grey hair, cut short and practical.
And at her right temple, there was a streak of white running back from her hairline — a different white than the grey surrounding it.
My blood went to ice, and I want to be precise about exactly why, because it wasn't the hair. I didn't understand the hair yet.
It was that I had seen that woman's exact face once before in my entire life, in a single photograph, tucked at the bottom of a shoebox in a wardrobe in a flat in Marrowgate, back in 2020.
I had asked Rhys who she was.
He'd told me it was his mother. And that she had died in 2016.
Rhys stood up so fast the chair went backward and hit the wall behind him.
May you like
He said one word.
"Mum."
