Sorrel is sixteen. Tibby is ten.
They welcomed him beautifully. That’s what I noticed first and it’s what I keep coming back to.
Not warmly. Beautifully. Like two people executing something.
Tibby asked him if he had a dog, which he does, and made him get his phone out, which he did, and there were eleven photographs of a dog called Bramble and it was all completely normal.
Sorrel said hello and then said almost nothing for forty minutes.
She ate. She watched him. And she had this small, closed, knowing little smile on her face the entire time, the kind you have when you already know the ending of something.
I nearly called it off. I want that on record. Halfway through the pasta I looked at my sixteen-year-old and thought: I don’t know who that is.
At about twenty past eight I stood up.
“I forgot the dessert. It’s in the garage freezer.”
There is no dessert. There has never been a dessert.
I went out to the garage and stood in the cold with the freezer open for four minutes, moving bags of peas around, feeling ridiculous.
When I came back in, the room had changed.
Roan was sitting completely still. Both hands on the table. His face had gone a colour I have only seen on people in hospital corridors, and he had his fork in his right fist so hard I could see the tendons.
Tibby was talking about a school trip.
Sorrel was eating.
I said, “Everything all right?”
And Roan looked up at me and did something with his eyes — one very small, very deliberate shake of the head.
So I sat down and I ate the rest of that meal and I made conversation about a school trip to a paper mill, and it took twenty-five minutes, and it is the longest twenty-five minutes of my adult life.
He left at half nine. He said goodnight to the girls and thanked them and did the whole thing perfectly.
At the front door he squeezed my arm once and said, “Tomorrow. Office. Before nine.”
I caught him in the car park outside Pellam at ten to nine the next morning.
I said, “What did they say to you?”
He looked around — actually looked around, at a car park at ten to nine on a Saturday — and walked me down the side of the building away from the doors.
He said, “Look. I don’t know how to tell you this.”
I said, “Just tell me.”
And he swallowed, and reached into his jacket, and handed me a folded piece of paper that my sixteen-year-old daughter had slid under his plate.
It was a page out of a school exercise book, folded into quarters.
On one side there was a photograph printed on it. A colour printout, slightly streaked, done on our own printer.
