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.
I had used her as a backup drive.
She has not held it against me and we still work the same shifts and she asks after Nia every single week, and I have never once been able to say sorry properly, because the only honest version is: I did not think of you as a person that morning. I thought of you as a copy.
Chelo.
She sees Nia once a month.
That took until the April and it took a mediator and it was the hardest decision I have made since the seventh of October.
Because she told me to take Nia and not complicate things. She said that on a phone, at seven o’clock in the morning, when she already knew.
And she was wrong, and she was managing her son instead of ringing 999, and if I had done what she said there would have been a fire in a terrace with Wilf at number nine in it.
