And I sat at that table and thought about the hundred and nine. Some of whom I know. One of whom taught me A-level maths and is seventy-three.
I had spent three months thinking of this as a thing done to my family.
What I have had to take.
Three words in a kitchen in 2021.
***Gran. Don’t.***
That is the one. Not broken. Not barren. Not the flowers with the card.
The one person in my life who had never been wrong about anybody told me she had had my husband looked at, and I shut her down in three words, because I was tired and sad and I did not want to be the woman whose family thought her husband was a wrong ‘un.
And there is a second one, smaller and worse.
In the June of 2023 I saw a message on his phone. It said: done, 8.5 tomorrow. Nothing else.
I asked him what it was and he said work, and I said fine.
Eight point five. The fourteen transfers ran between four thousand and eight thousand five hundred. There is a transfer of eight thousand five hundred dated the ninth of June, 2023.
I had it in my hand, on his phone, in my own kitchen.
