From the sixth of September I ran my own house like a job.
I photographed the policy schedule on the Saturday. I went through the second phone on two nights when he was asleep, and I know which nights because I logged
them — I logged them, in a folder, with times, the way you log a job.
I went to the loft on the eighteenth and photographed the box with the paperwork from the business in it.
And I cooked his dinner. Every night of those five weeks, because that is my half of the week, and because stopping would have told him.
On the twenty-seventh of September — the day after the torch clip — we took Nia to a thing at a farm, the three of us, and there are photographs, and in two of them I am laughing.
I have looked at those photographs about forty times this year.
That is a woman who had watched four minutes of her husband at a gas supply in the dark nineteen hours earlier, at a farm, laughing, with a child between them.
I was good at it. That is the thing. Seven years
of staying level on a line with somebody screaming on the other end, and it turns out that it works just as well at a kitchen table.
What happened afterwards.
He pleaded guilty in the June to arson with intent to endanger life and to a fraud charge. There was a trial on a third count which he was acquitted of and which I am not going to describe.
He got six years.
The house is sold. It was in negative equity by about sixty thousand because of a business of his that went in the October of 2024 and that I had signed things for in 2021, which is the second folder in this account and not one I am going to open here.
Nia and I are in a flat in Moraine City. It is small and it is ours and she has her own room and she
chose the colour.
And Fen, who I shared my location with and who I had told nothing for five weeks.
She was on the desk that morning. Not on my call — it came through to Lorrie — but she was four feet away and she saw the address come up on the board.
And she has said one thing to me about all of it, in the February, in a car park at work, and she said it without any heat at all.
She said: “You sent me a map pin.”
Five weeks of a folder, and the one thing I gave the person I sit next to for forty hours a week was a blue dot moving along the Moraine road at twenty past seven in the morning.
No message. No context. A location share, which is a thing you send a friend when you are walking home.
And she
said: “If it had gone wrong, I’d have spent the rest of my life working out what that pin was for.”
I had not thought about that once. Not in the car, not in the car park, not for four months.
