She said: “He’s the only one of the three of them who was trying to get it told.”
Because my father had told two people, and sworn both of them to silence, and the other one was my aunt.
Now the testing.
There is a predictive test. It is a blood test and it is not complicated and it tells you, with certainty, whether you have the gene.
You cannot walk in and get it. There is counselling first, over months, because the thing they have learned is that the hardest part is not the result.
Rhiannon tested in the June. She is negative. She found out on a Thursday and she rang me from a car park and neither of us could speak.
I have not been tested.
That is not indecision and it is not denial. About half of people at risk choose not to be tested, and the counsellors will tell you that, and they will not push you either way.
I know what I would do with a positive and I do not know what I would do with the waiting afterwards. That is the whole of my reasoning and I have had two years to improve on it.
Ethan proposed on the nineteenth of February, in the kitchen, with no plan, after an argument about a boiler.
The ring had been in a drawer in his mother’s house for four years. It is her mother’s. I had seen it on his grandmother’s hand at a funeral in 2019 and said it was beautiful, and he had remembered.
We married in the September.
My father walked me down the aisle, slowly, with a stick, which he did not have three years ago.
Here is where people split, and they split hard.
Half of them say my father had an absolute right to his own diagnosis, in his own time, and that it was his information to give.
The other half say that the moment a result affects your children’s reproductive decisions, it stops being only yours — and that three years of silence took three years of choices off two grown women.
I have landed somewhere that satisfies nobody, including me.
He was frightened and he is my father and I forgave him in about eight months.
And he took three years of my thirties, and Rhiannon’s, and he nearly took Ethan, because I was eleven minutes from driving away from the only person in that house who was trying to get the truth into the open.
If I had not stopped on those stairs, I would have gone.
And I would have spent the rest of my life believing a man who had bought a ring four years earlier simply did not want me.
