The eleventh of February, which I have never described to anybody and which Brodie will get when he is about sixteen.
Rhiannon came to the clinic. That is the part people assume did not happen.
She was thin by then and she had a hat on and she was not supposed to be out, and she sat in a waiting room in Harlow at eight in the morning holding my coat while I went in.
And afterwards, in the car park, she said two things.
The first was practical and extremely her: that whatever happened, I was not to tell her if it had not worked until she asked, because she did not want to see it on my face on a Tuesday.
And the second one she said looking out of the windscreen.
“Cat. If it works and I’m not here — he’s yours. Not mine. I’m not having a child brought up as a dead woman’s errand.”
I was nineteen and I said something stupid like don’t talk like that, and she said: “I need you to say yes.”
And I said yes in a car park in Harlow on the eleventh of February, 2015, and that is the actual contract in all of this, and it is not on any of the four documents I signed.
Which is why, when my father said who’s the father four weeks later, there was no sentence available to me that was both true and sayable.
Emlyn.
He was in the kitchen.
I did not know that either. He comes every year; he has not missed one; he sat in my mother’s kitchen on the tenth anniversary of his wife’s death with a plate in his hand.
And I came through that hall with a boy of nine who has his face.
He put the plate down on the side. He has told me since that he got as far as the doorway and could not do the rest of it, and that he stood there holding on to the frame.
Twenty people watched a man they have known for eighteen years look at a child he has seen once, for about eleven minutes, at two weeks old, in a hospital car park in the December of 2015.
He did not come near him. He asked me, from four feet away, whether he was allowed to say hello.
And Brodie — who had been told, on the drive down, in an eight-hour version that I had been constructing in my head for a decade — said: “Are you Emlyn?”
And that man said: “Yes.” And nothing else, because there was nothing else in him.
Why he was not there for ten years.
This is the part that has taken me the longest to be fair about.
He signed everything. He was at the clinic. He was at the twelve-week scan and the twenty-week scan.
And then his wife died on the ninth of November, 2015, and his son was born on the twenty-second of December, 2015, six weeks later.
And he came to the hospital, and he held that baby for eleven minutes in a car park because he could not do it inside the building, and then he gave him back to me and said: “I can’t. Not yet. I’m sorry.”
And not yet turned into a year, and a year turned into the way things are.
He has sent a card every December. No return address until 2021, and then a PO box in Harlow.
He has paid four hundred dollars a month into my account since the January of 2016 without one month missed, which I did not ask for and did not acknowledge for the first three years, which I am not proud of.
He is forty. He has not remarried. He has not had other children.
And when I finally asked him, in my mother’s garden on the ninth of November, 2025, why he had never once pushed — why he had never written to say I’d like to see him — he said:
“Because you’d been thrown out of your own house for him. I didn’t think I had the standing to ask you for anything.”
Two people, for ten years, each assuming the other one wanted them gone.
And the five weeks between the porch and leaving Innisbray, which nobody in that house knew about until the November of 2025.
I did not go to a friend’s. I went to Rhiannon’s.
Eleven miles away, in a flat with a lift that worked about half the time, with a woman who was having treatment three days a week and a husband who was working nights to keep the thing upright.
I slept on a sofa in my dying sister’s front room for thirty-four days while my parents thought I was God knows where.
And every one of those days she asked me to let her tell them, and every one of those days I said no.
That is the part that has rearranged the story for me since.
It was not only her promise by the March. By the March she wanted to break it — she wanted her mother — and I was the one holding the line, because I had been thrown out, and because the version where they found out was also the version where they came to her flat and found me on the sofa and there was a scene in front of a woman who had four weeks of energy left in her.
So for thirty-four days I protected my parents’ feelings from my sister’s needs.
And then I got on a coach to Calderwick on the fourteenth of April, 2015, and did not see her again for six months.
What I have had to take.
And here is mine, and it is not the nineteen-year-old in the front room. That girl was doing her best with four seconds and a promise.
It is 2016.
Rhiannon died in the November of 2015. The promise was to her and it was for a specific purpose, which was so that she could choose her own moment to tell our parents.
She died without telling them. Which means that from the tenth of November, 2015, there was nobody left for that promise to protect.
And I kept it for ten more years.
I could have written in the January of 2016. A letter, four lines: Rhiannon relapsed in January. She asked me to carry for her and Emlyn. The baby is hers. His name is Brodie and he was born on the twenty-second of December.
It would have taken eleven minutes and a stamp.
And I have made myself sit with the actual reason I did not, with a woman called Halla on Tuesdays, and it is this.
They threw me out.
And that information was the only thing I had ever had that they wanted.
As long as I did not send that letter, I was not a girl who got pregnant and got put out on a porch. I was a woman with a secret, and one day they were going to find out what they had done.
I told myself for ten years that I was keeping a promise to my dying sister.
I was keeping a weapon.
And the person I used it on was not my father. It was my mother, who did not throw me out and who has a photograph of me on the stairs and who spent ten years believing that her surviving daughter could not be bothered to come to the funeral.
What happened in that house.
It took about four hours and it was not a scene.
My father let go of my wrist about eleven seconds after he took hold of it, when my mother said his name once from the doorway.
He let us in and the twenty people did what twenty people do, which is go and stand in another room.
And I told it in my mother’s front room with the door shut and Emlyn sitting on the arm of a chair confirming the parts I could not get out.
The clinic. The January. The promise.
My mother asked three questions in four hours.
The first was: “Does he know he’s hers?”
Yes. He has known since he was six, in the age-appropriate version, and he has had the rest of it in stages, and he has a photograph of Rhiannon on his wall that he chose himself from four I offered him.
The second was: “Did she suffer?”
And Emlyn answered that one.
And the third she asked at about nine o’clock at night, when the house had emptied and there were four of us left, and she asked it looking at the carpet.
“Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”
And I said: because I was seven months pregnant with your grandson and I could not stand up in that church and be seen.
And my mother put both hands flat on her knees and cried in a way I had not heard in my life, and said: “I’d have had you. I’d have had you pregnant in that church in front of all of them. You were my daughter.”
And my father, who had not spoken for about forty minutes, said: “She’d have had you, Caitlin.”
And I said: I know she would.
And nobody said the other half of that sentence, which was sitting in the middle of that room the size of a car, and which is that she did not get a say, because he did not ask her in 2015 and she did not make him.
My father.
He has not apologised. Not in the way people want.
What he did, on the Sunday morning, was come out to the car while I was putting the bag in and stand there for a while and then say: “I’ve thought about that day every year. I want you to know I’d have come after you by the Wednesday. And your mother wouldn’t let me, because she said you’d ring when you were ready.”
So that is how that worked. He was waiting for me to ring and she was waiting for him to go, and the two of them sat in that house for ten years each believing the other one had the next move.
I have had to put that somewhere. It does not undo the porch and he knows it does not, and he has stopped offering it as though it might.
And my mother’s Tuesdays, which I did not expect and which I have had to let happen without interfering.
She has a box in the bottom of the wardrobe in Rhiannon’s old room.
Twenty-eight cards. Birthdays and Christmases, from the December of 2015 to the December of 2024, bought, written, addressed to Caitlin and one other name she did not know and had to leave blank.
She wrote: to Caitlin and the baby for the first four years. Then she wrote to Caitlin and your little one. The last six just say to Caitlin.
None of them are sealed. She told me, in the January, that she never sealed them in case I turned up and she had to add something.
She gave them to me in a carrier bag and said: “Don’t read them in front of me.”
And I have read eleven of them and then I had to stop, and I have not gone back, and the one I got to before I stopped is from the December of 2018 and has four words in it that I am not going to write down.
My father did not know the box existed either.
Thirty years married, and that woman kept a decade of cards for a daughter she thought was never coming back, in a wardrobe, in the room neither of them went into.
Where things are.
We moved back in the August.
Not into that house. A rented place about eleven minutes away, in Innisbray, and Brodie is at the school both his mothers went to, which is a sentence I have had to practise saying out loud.
He does Tuesdays with my mother after school. He has done since the January and she has not been late once.
My father takes him to the match. They do not talk much, by all accounts, which suits them both.
Emlyn comes one weekend a month. He is cautious to the point of being irritating about it and he asks permission for everything, and in the June Brodie asked him, in front of me, what he was supposed to call him, and Emlyn said: “Whatever you want. Take your time.”
He has settled on Emlyn, and I think that is going to be it, and I think that is all right.
And Brodie, who is the only person in this who has behaved well from start to finish and who was nine years old for most of it.
He asked me in the October. He did not sulk about it, and he did not ask twice, and when I said yes he said: “Okay,” and went and got his bag down from the top of the wardrobe himself.
On the drive he asked eleven questions, which I counted, because counting was the only thing keeping me on the road.
Four were about Rhiannon. Three were about whether my dad would shout. Two were about lunch.
And one, somewhere around hour six, was this: “If they’re horrible, can we just go?”
And I said yes.
And he said: “Okay. Then it’s fine.”
That is the whole of it. A nine-year-old worked out, in a car, that the thing that makes a frightening door bearable is knowing you are allowed to walk away from it — and then he walked up to it and knocked on it with me.
And when my father took hold of my wrist on that porch, Brodie did not cry and did not hide behind me.
He said, to a man he had never met, in a completely ordinary voice: “Can you let go of my mum, please.”
And my father let go.
And the last thing.
In the February, Emlyn gave me an envelope.
It is cream and it is sealed and on the front, in my sister’s handwriting, it says:
***For Brodie. On his tenth.***
She wrote it in the September of 2015, eight weeks before she died and fourteen weeks before he was born, and she gave it to her husband and told him to hold it.
He has had it for ten years and two months, in a drawer, with no address to send it to.
He did not open it. I did not open it.
We gave it to Brodie on the twenty-second of December, 2025, on his tenth birthday, three days late by the letter and exactly on time by any other measure, and he took it upstairs and was up there about twenty minutes.
And then he came down and told us one line out of it, which he said we were allowed, and the rest is his and will stay his.
May you like
- Ginger and Clove: A Warming Homemade Drink You Can Make in Under 15 Minutes
- Red Onions and a Simple Healthy Recipe for Everyday Wellness
- Ginger and Clove: A Simple Homemade Drink for Everyday Wellness
- Thyme: A Traditional Herb With More Uses Than You Might Expect
- The Almost Forgotten Fruit That Deserves a Place in Your Kitchen
He said she wrote:
***You were not an accident and you were not a replacement. You were a decision, and three people made it, and one of them was nineteen.***
See more on the next page
