We. That is the word, and I have used it every time, and it is correct and it is generous and it is what you say.
And in the July, going through it with Nuala, she asked me a question I did not like.
She asked what Saul says.
And I did not know. I have never once listened for it.
So I paid attention, for about two months, and the answer is that he does not say anything, because he does not bring it up and nobody asks him.
Except at his cousin’s in the August, where a man asked him about Marnie being our first.
And Saul said: “She’s our second.”
And then he said something about the drive.
And the man nodded and moved on and nobody at that table noticed anything at all, and I was standing about six feet away with a plate in my hand.
Ten years of we, from me, in rooms, about a list of weeks.
And one word from him at a buffet, which nobody heard but me.
Why I would not look.
And I have had fourteen months and a woman called Nuala on Wednesdays and I can get to it now.
It was not that I could not bear it.
It is that by the March of 2019 I had already had three, and I had worked out that the way through was to not let them be people.
And that was not cowardice. It is a thing that works and it got me through 2020 and 2022.
And on the fourteenth of March, 2019, a woman came in and asked me whether I wanted to see my daughter, and I knew — I knew in about one second — that if I did, she would be a person, and then there would be a person who had died, and I would have to carry her instead of carrying a thing that had happened.
So I said no.
And I would say it again, and I have told Nuala so, and she has never once suggested otherwise.
And the twenty minutes, which I was eleven feet away from.
That is the thing I did not understand for six years, because I had never once pictured the room.
I thought he had been taken somewhere. A separate room, a different floor, the way you imagine it.
He was in the next bay. Behind a curtain.
He told me that in the January, in passing, not knowing it was news.
Eleven feet. The same room I was in, with a curtain pulled across it, for about twenty minutes, at a quarter past two in the afternoon on the fourteenth of March, 2019.
And I was awake for all of it.
And I know what I did in those twenty minutes, because it came back whole in the February of this year, in a supermarket, the way they do.
