Reade Saunders

I call them the good years. I have always called them that. Beaming as though your brightness were my achievement. Perhaps it was. I left too many silences in my wake, so you filled them with pride on my behalf. It was easier that way.

D had remarried. She hated me, her eyes narrowed whenever my name was spoken, and I told myself I didn’t mind. I told myself he was gone, out of reach, and that was safer. But I wrote, in my own hand, on the same page: I minded terribly. Both sentences are mine. Both versions of me swore they were true.

That was the year she won. Not you, not me – she. His new wife, her jealousy sharpened into possession. And Dennis, weak as water, yielded. He handed you over without fight, saying you would find him again when you were older. He believed that was wisdom; I knew it was cowardice, but I don’t know if I meant mine or his.

Still, I repeat to myself: I did not protect you. I was away too much, or locked inside my own distress. I said to myself that survival was love. That work was love. That keeping the roof on was love. I can hear how hollow that sounds. But it was all I knew how to give.

The ‘Box‘ Cottage. That’s how I tried to begin again. Just you and me, our names on the door. But Peter lingered, drifting through weekends like an anchor that never quite held. And I—still restless, still pulled abroad by work—sent you to boarding school. You were six. Too small, really, carrying your hamster as if it were armour against the loneliness.

I told you it was opportunity. I told myself it was. The truth: it was abandonment dressed up as education. But even now I argue with myself: one voice says I gave you resilience; another says I gave you away.

The rhythm wore me down. Abroad four months of the year, gone in weekly rotations, while Peter gave you fun, bikes, adventure. He adored you, and you adored him back. I hovered on the margins, telling myself adoration lived inside me but never reached the surface. Sometimes I believed it. Sometimes I believed I had no adoration at all. I can’t tell which voice belonged to me and which belonged to the shadow that keeps taking over.

Australia.. That was the crack I could not plaster over. A betrayal (yes, I can name it) a confession, and then the discovery that I was pregnant. I told lies – first to him, then to you, then to myself. I shifted the narrative each time, like moving furniture in a room and calling it new.

When I finally told Peter the truth, he did what he always did: he stayed. We agreed to raise the child together.

To name her as another man’s was to write her story in disappearing ink, so that she would spend her life trying to read what had never been there.. But I had no other choice. Peter took the mantle of protector and he wore it well.

He moved back into the cottage, steady, patient, a man who could do the parenting I could not show. You glowed under his gaze. I shrank from mine.

I worked until the birth. You were there, Peter too, when the new life entered the room. Small, so small. I felt I must not breathe too close or I would shatter her. Peter gathered her in his arms, and you stood beside him, watching with wide, solemn eyes.

And I knew then that something had shifted. A chapter was closing, another beginning. But whether it was mine to live, or hers, I still cannot say.

There are lies told for convenience, and there are lies told for survival. But then there are lies that prefigure a destiny — the kind that carve a scar into a child’s identity before she has even breathed. These are not ordinary lies; they are ontological ones. They do not conceal a fact; they deform the very ground of being.

R-S