Chapter Thirty-Eight
Thirty-eight.
Eighteen months later:
Stockholm in autumn is a carnival for the senses.
A shortening, a falling, a blazing, a stillness; sharp mornings and clear skies; a slow procession into the unknown.
I exit Karolinska Hospital in yet another dazzling sunset, deeply grateful to have found another space on earth that feels right, no matter how far or how different it is from my cherished home in Devon.
I call my sister. “I’m just leaving now,” I say when she picks up. “How are they?”
“Appalling,” Maya shouts, over Maeve’s yells about something to do with skipping ropes.
Maya, somewhat improbably, is my children’s part-time nanny.
I am a single mother training to be a surgeon once again, and the only way I can make it work is to have help.
A few days after Dad’s funeral, I drove her to Heathrow to fly back to Colorado.
Six hours later she had reappeared in my kitchen with her suitcase.
She sat down at my table and burst into tears.
“I have no money and nowhere to live and you are my one and only plan,” she said, half laughing, half crying. “Can I stay for a while?”
I hadn’t been wrong; she was not happy in her beautiful Colorado life. Their setup had suited Eagle far better than it suited her. In the years since they’d stopped trying for a baby, Eagle had leaned into his alternative community, but Maya had not. She had become lonely, then depressed.
“Biscuit is my only real friend out there,” she said, laughing again, as tears drew gentle mascara stains down her cheeks.
“Everyone we know is lovely but they’re just…
they’re just not my people, Carrie. They are so far from being my people.
In fact, I’m not even sure why I’m calling them lovely.
I find them weird and culty and fucking annoying and I can’t go back there. ”
I asked if she’d called Eagle to talk this through. “No,” she admitted, because no matter how many years she’d spent as a therapist, she was still Maya. “I will, of course. But he won’t put up any sort of a fight and I want to be mentally ready for that.”
She hugged her knees. “I thought the slow lane was a way for me to feel safe, but it’s just…
it’s too fucking slow. I can’t take another day of it!
” For a moment she looked happy to have said this.
Then she realized she might never see Biscuit again and she started sobbing.
Through the sobs she told me she’d had to give up booze for good.
“I’m sorry I lied about that, too! I’m a loathsome fuckup. ”
Days later I was given a six-month reorientation and update training placement at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, with the promise of a further six months’ specialist updating if all went well. Maya offered to be my part-time nanny for the next twelve months. It was an obvious yes.
She started building an online therapy business at the same time, joined the local yoga studio, went on a bunch of internet dates before deciding never to try that again, and had regular FaceTimes with Biscuit.
From the very beginning of her employment she ignored the vast majority of my instructions, and our household was all the better for it.
Nine months into my update training placement, they told me I’d more than adequately demonstrated my clinical competence.
Once the year was over, I could move straight into a CT2 job: the level I was working at when I met Johan.
Three weeks after that, Yanika called. We’d stayed in touch over the past year and she had, unbeknown to me, managed to persuade the Royal College and my deanery to fund a yearlong exchange program.
A Swedish trainee from her hospital was to come to the UK for a year while a British trainee spent a year under her mentorship in Stockholm. “It’s yours if you want it,” she said.
There was never any question as to whether or not I wanted it.
Any general surgeon would want this training, at this hospital, with this woman as their boss.
But it came with many drawbacks: language barriers, Robin’s visits with the kids, schools, childcare, and—above all—uprooting the children, little more than a year after their father had moved out of the family home.
I was also very anxious about risking bumping into Johan again so soon after I’d begun to find my feet on my own.
But Maya had solutions to all of these problems, including the offer of her ongoing services as a nanny.
She had loved this city when she’d come to stay last year, and it made no difference to her therapy business if she was in a cottage in rural England or an inner-city apartment in Sweden.
The kids, who are now nearly eight, agreed readily to a year-long adventure in Sweden. I started over with Swedish lessons while the two of them and Maya learned together online.
“And Johan is only a problem if you allow him to be,” she reminded me. “Of course you won’t bump into him.” So I said yes, and here we are, and of course I haven’t bumped into him.
As with my last job, this contract has been a thrilling reminder of the power of yes in a life that had become polluted with no.
It’s reminded me once again of how I’ve missed surgery, Yanika, even on-call shifts.
Above all, how much I have missed myself.
It had been too long since I’d last woken up to the certainty that I could handle whatever was thrown my way.
“Put them on video,” I say, once the skipping-rope problem has been resolved.
“I might not,” Maya says, which makes my children cackle with laughter.
“Auntie Maya’s being naughty!” Maeve yells. “We went to the sweet shop and I’ve got a blue tongue! AND she’s letting us play in the pond in the park AND she’s taking us out for a dirty takeaway!”
I hear a corroborating splash and start laughing. “You’re fired,” I tell my sister, but she’s shouting at Raffy to leave the ducks alone.
“He mustn’t get too cold…” I begin, once I have Maya’s attention again, but she tells me to hush.
“It’s out of your hands, Doctor Carrie,” she says, and she’s right.
I’m going out for the evening for the first time since we moved here; Maya is in charge now.
If she decides to feed them blue sweets and let them wade in a cold pond in their school uniforms, I am in no position to argue.
And whatever the “dirty takeaway” is, it’s going to make my children very happy, and that’s the only thing I really care about.
In the past eighteen months, the children have proved to me that they are tougher than I could have imagined.
It hasn’t been plain sailing since we moved over here last month, but they’ve transitioned relatively well to their international school and both have made a tentative smattering of friends, even if I find Maeve’s choices alarming.
And with that curious adaptability that only children possess, they seem to have accepted the new normal of their life, with Daddy living in a different house—initially twenty minutes away, now several hours—with a baffling absence of anguish.
I’m more grateful still that they seem not to hold either of us responsible for the breakup.
The woman from Families Service says this is “epically fantastic” and that we are to keep up the hard work no matter what.
The “hard work” she’s referring to is our agreement to abstain from slinging mud at each other with our children.
And it has been very hard, much of the time.
Mum uncovered things about Robin that I wouldn’t have wanted to find out about a distant acquaintance, let alone my children’s father; my only survival strategy, at times, has been the oft-repeated mantra Robin is a decent person who was hired by bad people to do good things.
But there have been times when I have deeply hated him, when the best I could do was just close my mouth and not say a word when the kids came back after a weekend at his place.
It has been worth it, though. They are surviving. Some might say thriving.
The only certainty that has emerged about Robin is that I cannot believe a word he says.
Part of the reason I felt able to say yes to this job in Sweden is that he decided to take a freelance contract in Singapore for nine months for a philanthropic foundation.
Mum has done a lot of digging and she assures me that the foundation isn’t linked to Valentin Meyer, but that it has used charitable donations to clear up dirty reputations in the past. In spite of everything, he still cannot be trusted not to follow the money.
The “inheritance money” Robin cashed in so that I could become a stay-at-home mother, for example.
His parents had died, but he’d used his real inheritance to buy his flat in London many years before we met.
The “inheritance money” he gifted me was in fact the money he’d built up through these side hustles for Valentin Meyer.
My precious time looking after our children and healing myself was funded by a billionaire criminal who’d paid my husband to sanitize his reputation through charitable giving.
That this man’s money partly paid for our house is one of many facts of my life that I have to work very hard at accepting.
I have learned, also, that Robin went out of his way to obstruct my mother from having a relationship with our children or even me, hiding or throwing away gifts she sent and whisking us all away to our favorite hotel in Cornwall on more than one occasion when Mum had proposed a visit.
“Why should we give up our plans to see a woman who only bothers to make the journey once a year?” he used to say.
I think he feared Mum one day finding him out, if she got too close. Best to keep her at arm’s length by exploiting my already battle-weary relationship with her. Dad, who offered no obvious threat, was instead the target of Robin’s charm.
What I have to remind myself of, daily, is that Robin remains a good father to Raffy and Maeve.
He video calls them every other day at teatime, he looks after them very well when they’re with him, and he pays me child maintenance on the first of the month without quibble.
Before moving to Singapore, he came to their medical appointments, whether I asked him to or not, and he took them on a camping holiday this summer, which they described—without any care for my poor heart—as the BEST HOLIDAY EVER.
He’s prebooked four trips to Sweden from Singapore to make sure he sees enough of them while he’s working abroad.
Who am I to destroy their belief in their daddy?
It brings me no pleasure whatsoever that I hold silent power over the man, that he knows I could make things very bad for him, very quickly.
I don’t want that kind of power over my children’s father.
But when the resentment becomes too much to bear it can be quite enjoyable to send him a little reminder of who I am and what I know.
A carefully placed Instagram like on a post about his wonderful charitable endeavors, a knowing wink under a picture of him and a bunch of rich people at the polo.
They’re small weapons, really, but they’re better than nothing.
“Have fun at the disco, Mummy,” Raffy calls from somewhere in a slimy autumnal pond. “Don’t forget we want pancakes for breakfast!”
—
I get into my little Swedish car and start driving.
The city feels alive and vital as twilight thickens.
Diners steam the softly lit windows of small restaurants; trees drop blazing leaves onto pavements full of Friday-evening drinkers.
I drive slowly, enjoying the home I’ve chosen for the next eleven months. This city fills my heart with joy.
But the truth is: many areas of my life are filling my heart with joy these days.
In spite of my divorce, my fear of what Robin could drag us into next, the fact that I won’t become a consultant surgeon until I’m about eighty, I feel competent once again.
Purposeful and resourced. Even on bad days, I feel like I have something to build back up to, something to regain.
I had been without this recourse for years without even knowing it.
And for me this isn’t even about returning to work.
I think I’d be feeling this sense of agency, of jurisdiction, even if I’d continued to be a stay-at-home mum.
Between us, Robin and I kept me small for many years.
With gratitude I allowed him to “look after” me, to care for me, to supply all I needed so I never had to stray too far.
And I do believe he did that in part because he loved me—I have to believe that—and I also accept that the shrinking of self is a natural reaction to trauma.
But I also know that Robin, consciously or otherwise, was keeping me helpless, a woman who no longer thought to ask the kind of questions that could expose him.
Tonight I am not going to a disco, contrary to my children’s belief. But I am doing something that feels new: exercising my power of choice.
I am driving south, to a small cabin by the sea, to talk to a man I reached out to, on my terms, in my time.
The air rolling through the car window is soft and clean, the sky a darkening mauve, and I am happy.
This time I don’t get lost. I know what I’m looking for and where to find it. I am homing.