And the last entry in that notebook, in my mother’s handwriting, is dated the twentieth of November, 2025 — the day of the dinner, written that morning, before any of it happened.
Four words and a time.
***Thurs. Fish. N at work till 8.***
I came back at nineteen minutes to eight because I had left a folder on the hall table that I needed for a seven-thirty start on the Friday.
Eleven minutes.
Dermot.
My brother is thirty-eight. He took my wife’s phone off the worktop and stood in the back doorway, and he has never, in fourteen months, denied either of those things.
He gave an account to the police in the December and it is the same account he gave me, on my own, in a car park in Ellerbeck in the January, and I believe it, and it does not help him.
He says he thought Maia was having an episode.
He says our mother had told him, for months, that she was unwell, and that if it got bad somebody would need to stop her leaving in that state.
He says the bit with the bones was the first moment he understood that he had been got at — and that by then he was in the doorway and there were five people watching him and he could not work out how to stop being in the doorway.
