How could you lose a pregnant wife in a supermarket? That’s what people were asking. Cilydd watched the news item every night in a stupor, as if he were watching a story about someone else, as if it were some other unfortunate being he saw snivelling into his fleece at the press conference, eyes at half mast. ‘We are all concerned for my wife’s safety,’ he heard the sap say. ‘She is nine-months pregnant and very vulnerable.’ Very vulnerable. How Goleuddydd would have hated that. She had never been vulnerable in her life, let alone invisible. She wasn’t a woman you could miss, a splay of wild red hair twirling like a tornado around her small, perfectly formed face, a woman who walked in bold, quick strokes; it was always you who had to step aside, never her. But, as she had prophesied, the pregnancy changed her. As she grew bigger and bigger she somehow retreated into herself, became half the woman she had been, even as her flesh doubled. Her red hair stood static on her head, became a matted pink mess.
