The phone calls.
I rang my mother most Sunday evenings. Twenty minutes, sometimes half an hour, since my father died in 2019.
And I talked about my wife, the way you do. Not complaining. Just talking.
That Maia had cried at the twenty-week scan.
That she had not been sleeping since about the June.
That she and her sister had had a falling-out in the August and it was still not sorted.
That she had been off food and had lost weight in the first trimester.
That she had been “a bit up and down”, which is a phrase I apparently used eleven times, because it is written down eleven times.
The book.
My mother keeps a notebook. She has kept one for years — shopping, birthdays, what she has lent to whom. Everybody in that family has seen it a hundred times.
There is a section in the back with my wife’s name at the top of the page.
It starts in the September of 2023, a fortnight after the wedding, and it runs to the twentieth of November, 2025.
Dated entries. Short ones. Perhaps four a month.
And the majority of them — I have counted, and it is sixty-one out of ninety-four — begin with the same three words.
