If I Let You Go

No! He must have told her where he was going. A few seconds passed, then she threw my phone down on the sofa and ran to her room.

Excellent.

I sped across the room to get my phone. “Dom?”

“Yeah I’m still here. Shit. I’m a terrible father.”

His words were heavy with regret, and I sighed. “You’re not a terrible father. You can’t avoid the words ‘New York’ just in case she gets upset.”

“But she was happy a minute ago. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make your day harder.”

“It’ll be fine. I got her out of it this morning, I can get her out of it again.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Madison.”

My heart stilled in my chest.

Of course I knew how much he relied on me to take care of Tilly, but it wasn’t enough to stop him leaving me behind. Every time the reality hit me, it pierced another hole in my anger, turning it to pain, and leaving me wondering if this was it. If this was the moment it would pull me under.

“I have to go,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.

“Madison-”

“I’ll talk to you tonight.”

I didn’t let him get another word in. I turned off my phone and sank to the floor.

I hadn’t cried. I’d wanted to since the second Dominic said they were moving away, but it was easier to be pissed off than upset. Preferable even. But with Tilly falling apart, and Dominic struggling to cope, I couldn’t hold it back.

I let the tears come, the frustration, confusion and exhaustion draining out of me. I was so tired.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, curled up in a ball, quietly weeping. But when a tiny hand began stroking my hair, my awareness of my surroundings came streaming back. Tilly sat down beside me, and clutching her monkey with one hand, she comforted me with the other. I straightened my legs in front of me and pulled her onto my lap.

“Did Daddy make you upset too?” she asked.

“No, sweetheart,” I told her. “It wasn’t Daddy’s fault.”

It was all me, trying to make sense of everything.

“I thought you might need Mungo,” she said, handing me her favourite toy.

I smiled as I stroked his brown, mottled fur. “Thank you. A cuddle from Mungo is exactly what I need.”

“Daddy made me upset.”

“Oh, baby girl,” I said, pulling her to me. “Daddy doesn’t mean to make you upset.”

“I’m not a baby,” she mumbled into my shoulder.

She said the same thing to Dominic on Friday. We really had to stop calling her that.

“If Daddy didn’t want me to be upset, he wouldn’t be making me move to New York.”

“The thing is, sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. It’s like … when I have to do the ironing. I don’t like ironing, but if I don’t iron, you’ll have to walk around in wrinkly clothes.”

The scepticism in her eyes made me laugh, and I went on, “Okay, bad example. Remember when you first started school? You didn’t want to go there, but you had to because there are things you have to learn. Things me and Daddy don’t know how to teach you. And after a while, it started to get easier and you made new friends. Now you like school.”

“I do. But I want to stay at my school, with my friends. I want to stay with you. Daddy’s mean.”