In the small hours, while Yvette labored to bring forth the daughter who had already died, God was still with me. I had no idea that He was to steal away at dawn like a deserter from the camp. No use raising the alarm. By the time we left the hospital, He was long gone. This was the 12th September 1950.

A date I will go to great lengths to keep from Frobisher.

Yvette needed me so much, I had to give her something. The man she called New James was the best I could do by way of fabrication. My real self, the blundering, Godforsaken soul inside him, would have been worse than useless to her. While she begged me for the truth I shut my doors on her; even when the bleaching light seared the interiors of my closed eyelids I did not admit her.

Only later did I bring myself to tell her the truth. I know I did see her, but the shock of her death was so great that the memory has been erased from my mind. I am so sorry. That was the beginning of the end for my assumed, false personality. I don’t remember exactly when I struggled out from under New James. I was very glad to. He was absolutely exhausting.

Yvette was there waiting for me. She could talk to me now. She understood that, even if I couldn’t always reply, I was listening and taking her words to heart.

On the last evening before Tom was born, Yvette was so round, so burdened, that she tackled the stairs like they were a mountain face, her eyes shining coins of love. “I can’t take much more of this,” she said, and laughed, knowing that she could. That night in the small hours the bedside lamp lit her grin of pain and her fingers clenched in mine as I dialed the doctor’s number with my free hand. The doctor arrived with his pajama legs poking out from under his trousers. “Try to breathe, Mrs. Acton,” he implored her, but she had no time for breathing, only for strident dry-eyed cries as Tom appeared, his fast transit congesting her face, his little red bloody body sliding into the world. We knew him the moment he arrived. Of course he was Tom, there could be no other baby. He knew we were waiting for him. His howls told us so. Here I am! Here I am at last!