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would never be. Your wrinkles written on your face and crumbs around your mouth. Turning your pillow over with discreet pity, to bury your fallen hair. Looking down at my hands in the sink, reddened and rough from soap powder, and wrapped around your underpants. That future was no longer mine to experience.
    And so I laughed with a joy that came from being given the freedom to love you outside reality, as it were. In a magical place of half-light and shadows. A place you would return to again and again and find me waiting for you, unchanged and unmarked. Fingers cupped around the flame of what we shared, keeping it bright and steady. Keeping it safe.
    And, of course, there was our child. Our Fern. Already curled inside me, the size and shape of a sweet pea blossom. My secret to share.
    I’m not saying that I could manage to plumb those depths of joy and faith as deeply ever again, or even at all. Because I loved you. Because of course I wanted it all. I wanted the wrinkles and the fallen hair and the hands red and raw. And then I didn’t. And that’s how it’s been ever since that night; the relief and contentment followed so swiftly behind by the need and the longing that I can barely separate the push and pull of it all.
    I held your face between my palms and I kissed you, and I laughed, and we never spoke about it. Not once. I didn’t ask you to confirm it, because I didn’t need to. I’d seen it in your mouth.
    I think you always regretted that, and maybe you even resented it a little. I never gave you a chance to explain, did I? You wanted the opportunity to confess and excuse, make promises and then retract them, and I denied you that.
    But what I did, I did for us, and I did for me. I still believe that was right. Would it have helped me to see the photographs of your home, to imagine your heart beating against her spine through the night, to shout and cry and call you names?
    It wouldn’t have changed anything.
    But what if it had? What if all you’d needed was for me to imprison you with words, not set you free with silence?

3
    I was twelve when Granny Ivy died and gave herself the ultimate final say during a huge row with my mother. Mum was furious with her for months afterwards. I was furious with mum.
    I was on the fringes of the row though not part of it, curled in the very same armchair that mum now glowers from every night and claims didn’t even exist then. She’s wrong about that, I know she is.
    I was huddled in my dressing gown and slippers, hands wrapped over my head as spite arced across the living room in thin, sharp slivers. Words spat like pins. They dug through skin and flesh until they found my granny’s core and pierced it. She flung her hand out – To me? To mum? – and then plummeted to the floor, apron fluttering. A peace flag raised too late.
    The memory does make me pause when mum and I are in the middle of one of our insult hurling competitions, and for a second, as I look at her across the jagged pieces of all the things I wish I’d never said, I see in her pupils the tiny twin images of my granny’s felled body. And, though mum would never admit it, I know she looks at me and sees the same thing.
    I massaged Granny Ivy’s stricken heart, cradled it in my hands as it quivered and plunged in the cage of her chest and tried its hardest to fly away from me. Her lips the same grey as her hair. My mother standing over us both.
    Don’t you dare die! Get back up! Get up!
    By the time the ambulance arrived and two solemn men confirmed the worst, my knees were so cramped that I couldn’t straighten properly. Mum pulled me to my feet and helped me hobble into the kitchen, where I was sick in the sink until there was nothing left of my porridge. I stayed draped against the slippery porcelain for a while, gripping onto the taps and staring down the plughole, and I wondered how much of Granny Ivy had just come out of my mouth.