It is the most useful sentence I own, because it closes a conversation and it costs me nothing.
And what I actually did, every time I said it, was tell the woman in front of me that whatever had just happened to her was not going to be looked at.
Two years of Sunday phone calls, a key I had cut without asking, and that sentence — and I want to be exact, because this is not self-pity and I have had to stop doing the self-pity version.
My mother did it. My mother is the one who put her hands on a pregnant woman and my mother is the one who sat in a kitchen on the morning of the twentieth of November and wrote down what time I would be at work.
But she could not have built the story without the information, and there was only one person giving it to her, and I was ringing her every Sunday at seven like a man doing his duty.
I was the source. That is in a notebook, sixty-one times, with my initial on it.
Maia.
She had Nina on the sixth of January, 2026, by section, at thirty-nine weeks.
The birth was fine. I am aware that is not always how this goes and we were lucky, and I have been told about four hundred times to say so.
