Thirteen years after my ex-husband abandoned me and our twin boys, I found him standing beside his mistress and their son at a statewide academic competition, and his first reaction was fury. “How dare you come here!” he snapped, but hours later, when my twins walked onto the stage and collected two gold medals, his face turned purple.
My name is Alannah Rhodes and I had not been in a room with Dermot in thirteen years.
And then I saw him at the registration desk at Kelvedon Hall.
Simone was next to him, and their son, in the blazer of a school that costs more a term than I used to earn in four months.
And he saw me.
“Alannah?”
And whatever that was on his face went to irritation inside about a second.
“What are you doing here?”
And Simone came forward with a small polite smile. “This is a private event.”
“It’s a state competition,” I said. “It’s in the name.”
And he dropped his voice, which is what that man does when he is actually angry.
“How dare you come here today.”
Four or five people heard him.
What he did not notice were the two seventeen-year-olds standing about four feet behind me.
Or perhaps he did not know them.
The last photograph he has of our two is from a christening in 2008.
“I’m here for my children.”
And he laughed. “Your children?”
His eyes went over the boys and came back to me.
“This weekend matters to our son.”
“It matters to mine as well.”
Thirteen years of birthdays and school concerts and dentists and about four thousand ordinary dinners were standing between us, and that man genuinely appeared to believe I had turned up to interfere with his life.
I did not argue.
“Come on. Registration shuts in ten minutes.”
And as we walked away, one of them said, quietly: “Mum. That was him, wasn’t it.”
“Yes.”
And the other one looked back. “Our dad?”
“Yes.”
And neither of them said another word.
At the time I thought they were stunned.
I was wrong.
At four o’clock the individual awards started.
Applied mathematics, and my son’s name went round that auditorium. Gold.
And I had barely got a breath in before the physical sciences results, and my other son won gold as well.
And then another announcement: the highest raw score in the state.
Two brothers. Two golds. The same surname, in the same row.
I looked for Dermot. Eleven seats along and four rows behind me.
And I watched that man understand it in stages.
He heard Rhodes twice. Then both of them stood up together. And then the second one got to the stage, turned towards me, and grinned.
He has his father’s exact face.
And for about eleven seconds, watching Dermot work it out was the best thing that has ever happened to me.
And then a man two rows in front leaned over to his wife. “Who are those boys?”
And she looked at the programme. “The Rhodes twins. Both got gold. One of them’s just set a state record.”
And then she said, loudly enough for our whole section: “Their mother brought them up on her own. She ought to get an award as well.”
He heard every word of it.
He had walked past his own sons that morning and not known them.
And then Caius came down off that stage, and instead of coming to me he changed direction and went straight at his father.
Dermot stood up.
And my son stopped in front of him with the medal still round his neck, and got an envelope out of his jacket.
“Dad. My brother and I have been waiting thirteen years to give you this.”
What was in the envelope.
Two letters. Neither of them written by my sons.
The first is four pages in my handwriting, dated the ninth of June, 2012.
I wrote it eleven days after Dermot left and I never sent it, and I put it in a box, and until the eighteenth of October, 2025, I believed that nobody on this earth had ever read it.
The second is an envelope postmarked the fourteenth of November, 2016, addressed to me in his handwriting.
It is unopened.
It was unopened in 2016 when it arrived and it was unopened in that auditorium and it had been in the same box in my loft for nine years.
My son did not hand his father an accusation.
He handed two adults one letter each that neither of them ever delivered, and then he stood there and waited.
The box.
It is a lever-arch box file with HOUSE 2011–13 on the side and it has been in the loft at Marram Vale since we moved.
The boys found it in the August of 2022. They were fourteen. They were up there getting the camping things down.
They have had both of those letters for three years and two months.
Three years.
They read my 2012 letter at fourteen, and they put it back in the box, and then they came down the ladder and had their tea and asked me whether there was any more juice.
And they never said one word about it.
Not at fourteen. Not at fifteen when Milo went through the phase of asking. Not at sixteen when I told them, in a car, for about the fortieth time, the version I had been telling them since they were six.
What my version was.
That their father left in the June of 2012 and that it was not about them and that he did not want to be found.
That is the sanded-down one. I have been saying it since 2014 and I have said it with my hand on my heart.
What is in my own letter from 2012 is that I asked him to stay.
I asked him three times. It is in there in detail because I wrote it eleven days afterwards when I could still hear it.
And it has in it the sentence he said to me in that kitchen on the twenty-ninth of May, 2012, which I have never repeated to another living person and which I am not going to put in here.
I will say this much: it is eleven words long, it is about the two of them and not about me, and it is the reason I have never once, in thirteen years, encouraged my sons to look for their father.
I told them he did not want to be found.
What I was actually doing was making sure they never heard eleven words.
And they have known since they were fourteen. They have had the four pages. They know what he said and they know that I begged and they know that the smooth version in the car was something their mother was carrying for them.
And for three years those two boys let me keep carrying it, because they could see that I needed to be the one who had it.
I thought I had a secret and I had an arrangement, and I was the only one in the house who did not know.
The eleven seconds I keep going back to, which are the only part of that day I have not had taken off me.
Everything else about the eighteenth of October has been reorganised. The entry list was arranged in September. The letters were in a loft since 2022. I was transport.
But the eleven seconds when that woman two rows in front said their mother brought them up on her own are mine, and I was not managed into them by anybody.
I have thought about what I did with my face for those eleven seconds and the honest answer is that I did not look at my sons.
They were on a stage. One of them had just set a state record. I had about four seconds of looking at two seventeen-year-olds in borrowed blazers and then I turned round in my seat to see whether Dermot had heard it.
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