“What?”
“If the press get a photograph of you being carried out of this hotel, that’s the campaign.” And then, to her: “Handle it quietly.”
Then he went downstairs and made a speech about infrastructure.
Two men from his security team took me out through a service corridor and down in the goods lift, because the front of that hotel had cameras on it.
By the time I was in a resuscitation bay the monitors were going and there were three heartbeats on a screen and one of them was dropping.
Ambrose Kettle came in at a run.
“Severe abruption. We’re going now.”
“Will they live?”
“We’re going to fight for all four of you.”
I signed the consent.
And then I asked for one more thing, and the nurse had to go and find somebody, and it took about eleven minutes that I did not have.
A revocation. Everything that gave Callum Ridder any authority over my care or theirs, withdrawn, witnessed, at twenty past nine at night on a clipboard.
If I came out of that room he was not making one more decision about any of us.
Then white light and masks and voices over the top of me.
Baby A out. Baby B. And then a pause that went on too long, and somebody saying a number I did not understand.
I said the names I had chosen in the March. Mira. Juno. Lark.
And then nothing.
I came round four days later in intensive care and my sister Nessa was in the chair.
She did not say hello. She put a tablet in my hands.
