Thirteen years after my ex-husband abandoned me and our twin boys, I found him standing beside his mistress and their son

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.

I turned away from the thing I had spent thirteen years building, to check that the man who had not been there was watching.

And he was. And it was wonderful.

And Milo has a photograph that somebody from the school took

from the side of the hall, of the two of them on that stage, and about eleven rows back there is a woman in a green jacket with her head turned the wrong way.

He has never said anything about it. He sent it to me in the November in a message with four other pictures and nothing written underneath.

The 2016 letter.

That one is mine and it is worse.

It came on the fourteenth of November, 2016. The twins were eight.

I remember it on the mat. I remember the handwriting. I remember standing in that hall for about four seconds.

And I did not open it, and I did not bin it, and I put it in a box file in the loft marked HOUSE 2011–13, which is not where you put something you are throwing away and is exactly where you put something you intend never to deal with.

I have told four people over the years that he never got in touch.

That is not true and I have known it was not true since the fourteenth of November, 2016.

One letter in thirteen years is not a campaign and it does not make him a father.

But he never got in touch and he got in touch once and I put it in the loft are two different sentences, and I have been using the first one for nine years, including to his sons.

And the nine years that letter sat up there, which I have had to take apart with a woman called Halla since the January.

I did not forget about it. That is the version I tried in the car park.

I went up there for Christmas decorations every single year. The box is at the front, under the window, by the water tank, and I have moved it with my own hands at least fourteen times.

And in the November of 2019 — the twins were eleven, and Milo had been asking about his father for about six weeks, and I had been handling it badly — I went up that ladder specifically for it.

I got the box down. I took the envelope out. I sat on the floor of the landing with it for a long time.

And then I put it back.

That is the one. Not 2016, when I was thirty-two and raising two eight-year-olds on my own and could barely stand up.

2019, when I was thirty-five, when I was all right, when I had a job and a house and a child asking me direct questions — and I got it down on purpose and chose not to open it and put it back under the window.

And then went downstairs and told an eleven-year-old that his father had never got in touch.

Two hours after holding the evidence that he had.

What the boys did.

And here is the part that reorganised everything, and it came out in a hotel car park at about half past six that evening.

They did not enter that competition and happen to find him there.

The entry lists go up in the September. Jasper Farrow was on it, for Blackmoor Priory, in applied mathematics.

They knew his name. They have known it since 2022, because there is a change-of-address card in that box with three names on it, which is how two fourteen-year-olds in a loft found out that they had a half-brother.

Caius sat the applied mathematics paper on purpose. That is the category his brother was in.

He did it to be in the same room.

Not to beat him — and I want to be fair to my son, because he has been clear about this and I believe him. He said: "I wanted him to have to read my name on a board."

And he got the highest raw score in the state, which nobody can plan, and which turned a thing he had arranged into a thing that looked like fate.

So that entire day — which I have described to about thirty people as the universe finally doing something decent — was organised in a bedroom in Marram Vale by two seventeen-year-olds in the September.

They booked it. I drove them to it. I sat in that auditorium feeling like a woman being handed something, and I had been transport.

What was in his letter.

He opened it in the car park. Not in the hall; he had the sense for that.

It is one side of A4 and it is not an apology.

It is four lines about an address, and then a request for a photograph of the boys, and then a sentence saying that if I would rather he did not write again, he would not.

And I did not answer it.

So he did not write again. Exactly as he said.

Nine years of me telling people that man never got in touch, when what actually happened is that he asked one question, I did not answer it, and he kept his word about the consequence.

That is the whole of it. I have been turning it over for a year and it does not get better and it does not get worse.

Dermot.

I am not going to rehabilitate him and he has not asked me to.

He left two four-year-olds in the June of 2012 and he said eleven words in a kitchen before he did it, and he has never paid a penny that was not taken off him by an order, and the order only exists because I applied in 2015.

And he wrote one letter in 2016 and let one unanswered question close a door for nine years, which is what a man does when he is relieved to be let off.

He has met them twice since the October. Both times were arranged by Caius, who has turned out to be the sort of person who sends calendar invitations.

It is going slowly and badly and Milo has been to one of the two.

And in the December Dermot said one thing to me on a telephone that is the only useful sentence he has produced.

He said: "I didn't recognise them because I'd stopped keeping a picture of what they'd look like."

And then: "I did that on purpose, Alannah. In about 2014."

And the registration desk, which I have had described to me from the other side and which was not what I thought.

I had Dermot's how dare you come here today as the opening line of this story for about four months.

And in the February, Simone told me what had happened in the eleven minutes before it.

Jasper had been sick in the car on the way in. Not nerves about the competition — he has a thing about the medication he takes for it and had got the timing wrong, and they had pulled onto a verge twice.

They had arrived with about fourteen minutes to go. Dermot had their paperwork in the wrong bag. A woman on that desk had already told him twice that the entry had to be signed in person by a parent and that the guardian form was incomplete.

And then he turned round and there was me.

None of which makes how dare you come here today anything other than what it is, and I have not softened it and neither has she.

But I had been carrying it as a man who looked up, saw his abandoned wife, and reached for cruelty.

It was a man forty seconds into being told his son's forms were wrong, who turned round and found the one person in the building who had every right to watch him be bad at it.

That is not an excuse. It is a different eleven seconds than the one I had been selling, and I would rather have the real one.

Simone and Jasper.

The boy is seventeen and is a perfectly nice boy and is the one in all of this that nobody has thought about.

He found out in a car park that he had two brothers, from a man who had told him his father's first marriage had no children in it.

That is the thing I did not know until the February, and it is the one I find hardest.

Dermot Rhodes had told his second family that there were no children.

Not that he had been a bad father. That they did not exist.

And Simone — who I had spent thirteen years thinking of as the woman at the registration desk with the small smile — found that out in the same car park as everybody else, and she walked off across it and made a phone call to her sister and did not come back for forty minutes.

She wrote to me in the January. Two pages. I have not answered it yet and I am going to.

Jasper and the twins have been in contact since about the March. That was entirely them and I had nothing to do with it and neither did she, and the three of them seem to communicate exclusively through something I am not allowed to join.

What happened with me and the boys.

I was angry for about four days.

Which is the most ridiculous thing in this entire account and I knew it at the time.

I was angry that they had organised it. I was angry that they had read my letter. I said something on the Tuesday about how they had used me as a driver that I would give a great deal to take back.

And Milo — who is the quiet one and who had said almost nothing since the car park — said: "You kept his letter for nine years, Mum."

Not shouted. Not even unkindly.

And I said that was different.

And he said: "Why?"

And I did not have an answer in that kitchen and I did not have one in the car the next day and I have one now, and it is not a good one, and I have given it to them.

It is that I thought I was protecting them from eleven words, and that somewhere in about 2017 it stopped being about eleven words and became about not having to be the woman who had been left.

As long as he never got in touch, I was a woman something happened to.

If he got in touch once and I put it in the loft, I am a woman who made a decision about her sons' father in a hallway in four seconds and then described it to everybody as abandonment for nine years.

And the thirteen years, which nobody at that competition could see and which I am going to put down once, because I have earned it and because the rest of this account does not.

Four thousand seven hundred and forty-odd dinners. I have done the arithmetic and it is roughly that.

Two cases of chickenpox three weeks apart in 2013, which anybody who has had twins will understand.

Eleven years of a Tuesday-and-Thursday job that I took because it fitted the school day and that I was far too qualified for, and which I did not leave until 2021.

A night in the April of 2016 when Milo had a temperature of forty and I drove to the hospital at Thornecliffe with both of them in the back because there was nobody to leave Caius with.

Nobody applauded any of that and nobody was ever going to, and a woman two rows in front said one sentence in an auditorium and I nearly came apart.

That is the thing I would say to anybody who is in the middle of it now.

It is not that you want a medal. It is that thirteen years can go past without one single adult, ever, in your hearing, saying out loud that the thing you are doing is hard.

And then one does, by accident, to her husband, about somebody she has never met — and you find out exactly how much room you had been keeping empty for it.

And the last thing.

They have not opened it.

I assumed — the whole way through that car park, and for four months afterwards — that they must have read his 2016 letter in 2022 along with mine.

They did not.

They read my four pages at fourteen, because it was loose in the box and they were fourteen and it had their names in it.

And they did not open his, because it was sealed and it was addressed to me, and because — Caius said this in the February, in a completely ordinary voice, while doing something on his phone —

"It wasn't ours."

Two boys sat on a loft ladder in the August of 2022 holding a sealed envelope addressed to their mother from the father they had never met, and they put it back in the box.

And then they carried it, unopened, for three years and two months, to a hall in Thornecliffe, and handed it to the man who wrote it, without ever finding out what was in it.

They still do not know. He has not told them and I have not told them and they have not asked.

I have asked them twice whether they want to know and both times Caius has said the same thing, which is: "If he wants us to know, he can say it to us."

Which is more or less exactly what I have spent thirteen years failing to do.

And the only thing I have got out of any of this that is actually mine is a thing I did in the March, which took about nine minutes and which nobody applauded.

I sat the two of them down in our kitchen and I told them the eleven words.

Out loud. In his voice, as near as I could do it, with the date.

They already knew. They had read it on page two in 2022.

But they had never heard it from me, and the only reason that sentence had any power in my house for thirteen years is that I was the one keeping it.

It took nine minutes and then Milo got up and put the kettle on, and Caius said — and I have decided this is the end of it —

"Right. So that's just a thing he said, then."