Because I knew — because Perrin had told me in March, standing in my kitchen, in the specific flat voice people use when they’ve decided not to be embarrassed about it — that there wasn’t going to be a birthday that year.
Effie has a programme. Speech and language, physio, and an early intervention block that runs in ten-week sets.
It is not covered. It is four hundred and ten dollars a set and there are five sets a year, and Perrin works twenty-six hours at a pharmacy and she had, in March, exactly enough for the programme and nothing else.
She said, “She’s two. She won’t know.”
I said that was completely fine and nobody would think anything of it, and I meant it.
Felix did not forget the dress.
Over the following weeks I noticed things and I read all of them wrong.
He turned down an ice cream on the eleventh of April, which is not a thing that child has ever done.
