Amara and I did eleven months of counselling and we are all right now, in a way that took about two years and that I did not deserve for most of it.
The thing I have not got past is not the maid’s room and not the cards.
It is that she told me.
In the August, on a phone, from a car park. She said the cards were being declined and asked me to look at the account.
And I said I would sort it when I was back, and I was in Verrin City, and I did not.
My son bought every inch of this house.
My mother said that twice. Once in a doorway to an audience of one, and once at a table in front of twenty-five people with my wife’s place cards in her hand.
Both times she was standing in a building that had belonged to my wife for four years.
And the only reason nobody in that dining room knew it was that four years earlier I had signed twenty documents on a Thursday afternoon without reading a single one of them, and then forgotten which house I lived in.
THE END
