PART 1
Five minutes after the judge finalised it, my ex-husband looked at me and said:
Take the girls, Isadora. I’ve got a son on the way now.
The room went quiet for a second.
Fitch was standing by the mediator’s table checking his watch, as though he had said nothing at all out of the ordinary, and I do not think he had. Not in his own head.
And I was picturing our daughters at home. Marit, who is ten, and Wren, who is seven.
I closed my folder and said: all right.
He looked disappointed that I was calm. I think he had budgeted for a scene, and I think a scene would have been useful to him, and I have thought about that since.
He said: Thessaly’s appointment is at eleven. My parents are meeting us there.
His father had already started calling that unborn baby the Tarleton heir. Out loud, at family lunches, in front of my two daughters — as though they had sat a test nobody had told them about and failed it.
His family knew I was in the Army. They had never cared enough to find out what that meant.
His mother called it my office position. Fitch once told a friend of his, in my hearing, that I mostly handled paperwork for people who make the actual decisions.
I stopped correcting them years ago. Partly because a lot of what I do is not mine to discuss, and partly because the assumption kept everybody comfortable, including me.
He said: you’ll have the girls tonight? Thessaly needs a quiet house.
I said yes.
Our bags had already been shipped. Our passports were in my carry-on. My posting started that evening and had been on paper since the January.
He signed the relocation agreement in the March without reading it. He initialled the clause twice. His own solicitor sent it to him.
I want to be honest about that clause, because people enjoy it and then they look at me a certain way.
I did not hide it. It is not buried in an annexe and it is not in small print. It is clause fourteen and it has a heading, in bold, that says Relocation, on page six of an eleven-page document.
His solicitor will have gone through it with him. That is the job and Odell Vance is a perfectly competent man.
Fitch did not read it because he had already decided what that document was.
It was the thing that ended the tedious part of his life so that the interesting part could start at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday at a scan appointment.
You do not read page six of a document you have already emotionally filed.
I know that about that man because I was married to him for thirteen years and he has never once read anything to the end, including a menu.
At the military terminal, Marit sat next to her sister and worked a zip loose on Wren’s backpack because it had caught on the lining.
She did it the way she does everything, which is without being asked and with her tongue slightly out.
They had no idea their father had dismissed them that morning for a baby he has never met.
Then my phone started going. Once, twice, four times before I answered.
His voice was wrong.
He said: where are you? I need to talk to you.
I said: I’m busy.
He said: the doctor says Thessaly’s further along than she told me.
Then he said: the timing doesn’t work. I was out of the country.
And before I could say anything, an officer came through that terminal and nodded at me and said: Colonel Bennick, transport’s ready in twenty.
The silence on that phone was immediate and it lasted about four seconds.
He said: Colonel?
I said: you knew I was in the Army.
He said: I thought you were in administration.
And I said: no. You just never asked.
He started demanding to know where I was taking the girls, and I reminded him about the clause he initialled twice, and he said he had trusted me.
I nearly laughed at that.
Seven months earlier I had found what I found, and he told me I was paranoid, twice, in our own kitchen — and I stopped arguing and started documenting.
Then he lowered his voice and said: Thessaly says there was somebody else.
I looked through the glass at my two girls with their heads together over one book.
And I said: then ask her the questions you should have asked before you threw away your daughters.
A minute later the desk called my name.
The officer said, carefully: Colonel, there are two visitors requesting access.
I said: who?
And he said: Fitch Tarleton and his mother.
PART 2
They did not drive out there to apologise.
I want that said plainly, because for about eleven minutes in that hall I thought they might have.
With no son, my daughters are the only grandchildren in that family.
And my former father-in-law’s seat on the family trust board is conditional on there being grandchildren in his line. It has been since 2011. It is one paragraph and it is not complicated and I have read it perhaps two hundred times.
They did not come for Fitch’s daughters.
They came for that man’s grandchildren, which is a different thing entirely, and they came within two hours of a scan.
There were about twenty people in that hall when she got to me.
Perpetua Tarleton got hold of my arm and said it loud enough for every one of them:
Those girls are Tarletons. You’re not taking them out of this country.
Nobody moved. Somebody set a bag down on the floor.
She did not let go. She leaned in and said:
Don’t be difficult. Well?
And the thing I noticed, standing there, is that her son was five paces behind her.
He did not come any closer. He did not say one word in that hall.
He was looking past me at the glass wall, at two children he had described as something to be taken off his hands at nine o’clock that morning, and his face was doing something I have never seen it do.
I have been asked whether I felt sorry for him in that moment and the honest answer is that I did, for about a second and a half, and that I have not since.
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