The last one is from the Thursday. It says: Em. Fifty people. You cannot do this to yourself. Please.
Emily did not answer it.
So at seventeen minutes past four on the Saturday morning a thirty-one-year-old midwife drove two hours and ten minutes, walked into my garage through a door that has not bolted since 2019, took two hundred pink balloons out of a white box and put thirty black ones in, taped a hospital bracelet to the inside of the base on a silver string, and then walked back across my lawn and stopped and lifted her face into the camera light for four seconds so that there would be absolutely no question who had done it.
She did not run. She wanted to be found. That is the only part of this I have never had to think twice about.
Now the part I have to be honest about.
Emily did not hide it because she was frightened of Jake. Jake has been, through all of this, better than anybody.
She hid it because of the party.
Because her mother had been planning it since the June. Because I had booked the church tables and rung thirty-one people and put it on Facebook and told my sister in Wexford, who was coming over for it.
Because on the eleventh of October, four days after the worst appointment of her life, she rang me and I spent eleven minutes talking about cupcakes.
She said to me in that kitchen: “You were so happy about it.”
Twenty-eight years old, five weeks into the worst thing that has ever happened to her, driving six hours a fortnight on her own, and the load she could not put down was her mother’s afternoon.
No police action was taken. Jake withdrew it on the Sunday morning. Deborah refunded half and would not take an apology.
Emily was admitted on the Sunday afternoon, one day late, because she spent the Saturday night in my spare room instead of in a car on a motorway.
She did not speak to Priya for nineteen days.
On the twentieth day Priya came and sat in the corridor outside the ward for six hours without going in, and Emily sent her a message that said one word, which was come.
The baby was born on the fourteenth of February at thirty-eight weeks and two days, at the hospital three hours away, because that is where the operation is done.
Her name is Wren. She had her surgery at thirty-one hours old and it took four hours and ten minutes and I walked the length of that corridor so many times that a nurse eventually brought me a chair and physically sat me in it.
She is eight months old. She has a scar along her left side about the length of my little finger and she has no idea it is there.
Priya is her godmother. That was Jake’s idea and he did not consult me about it, and he was right not to.
People who hear this story split exactly in half and they split fast.
Half of them say what Priya did was monstrous. Fifty people in a garden. A pregnant woman crying on her own lawn. There were nine children at that party.
The other half say she was the only adult in the entire thing.
I have had eighteen months and I have not landed on one.
What I do know is this. I had five weeks to notice that my daughter was driving six hours a fortnight and losing weight in the second trimester, and I noticed the cupcakes.
Priya had to drive two hours in the dark and fill a box with black balloons to make me look at her.
And it worked. That is the part nobody wants said out loud. It worked.
