PART 3
It took the detectives nine days to assemble what Adrian had spent twelve years hiding, and I will give it to you in the order it broke over me, because that is the only way I can bear to tell it.
I did have twins.
Two girls, born eleven years ago, on a night I nearly di.ed on the table.
Adrian was told, in those first frantic hours while I was unconscious, that we’d had two.
And Adrian — drowning even then in debts I didn’t know about, a man who had already borrowed against a future that hadn’t arrived — made a decision in the space of one night that shaped the next eleven years.
He registered one baby.
Elsie.
The other, Junie, he handed to a woman named Vanessa — his girlfriend, it turned out, a relationship that had run underneath our marriage like a second set of pipes for over a decade.
Vanessa could not have children.
