My husband be@t me for refusing to live with my mother-in-law. Then he calmly went to bed. The next morning, he handed me a luxury makeup kit and said, “My mother’s coming for lunch. Cover that up and smile.”

She said she had nearly not written to me in the May.

She had known about me since 2021. The wedding was in a magazine. She had watched for four years, from an hour away, and not said anything.

Because in 2017, when she left, she had told two people. His best man. And Georgiana.

She had gone to Georgiana — in person, at her house, with photographs — and told her what her son did.

And Georgiana had listened to all of it and then said: “Have you tried being less provoking?”

And after that, Cressida said, she stopped believing that telling anybody changed anything.

And it took four years of watching a stranger in wedding photographs, and then one photograph in the April of me at a charity dinner with long sleeves in a heatwave, for her to try once more.

“You were the first person I’d told in eight years,” she said. “And for eleven days you didn’t answer.”

And I said I was sorry.

And she said: “Don’t be. For eleven days in 2017 I didn’t answer myself.”

Where things are.

I live in the house at Harrow Point. On my own. I had the big windows fitted with blinds.

The black phone is still behind the loose tile under the basin.