He filled his own card in in the March of 2025. Four months before I met him.
And Ambrose Kite’s instruction — the only instruction he had — was to give me the bag and tell me to look at the last card.
And then there is the twenty-second notebook, which he was writing in the last fortnight, and which is the actual answer to why he married me.
Because the reason he gave me is not the reason.
“I’d rather not go out as a file number.” That is a good line and he knew it was a good line and I believed it completely for about eleven days.
In that last notebook, on the fourth of August — two days before he asked me — there are four lines about me.
Not sentimental. He does not do sentimental; I have read four hundred and eleven entries and the man wrote like a clerk.
“T.A. Fourteen months in. Will still be doing this at fifty. Nobody who does this for that long ends up with anybody in the room. N. didn’t. I didn’t. She needs to be in somebody’s box.”
***She needs to be in somebody’s box.***
He married me so that I would have a card.
So that somewhere in the world there would be a piece of paper with my name on it, and a date, and a line saying that I was somebody’s wife — because he had watched four hundred and eleven people go out without one and he had done the arithmetic on the sort of person who volunteers at twenty-eight after her mother dies.
He was not protecting himself from dying alone. He had been ready for that since 2006.
He was doing it to me. Deliberately. In advance. Because he had four months of a heart that was failing and one useful thing left that he could do.
And he did not tell me, because if he had told me I would have said no.
He was right. I would have.
What I did with it.
Lorcan and Fenella.
I found them in about four days. It is not difficult.
I rang Lorcan on the twenty-ninth of August.
He listened for about ninety seconds and then he said, “I don’t know what you want from me,” and put the phone down, and I sat in my kitchen and was sick.
Fenella rang me back the following evening.
We were on the phone for three hours and ten minutes. She got off it at one point for about four minutes and I could hear her being upset in another room.
She came down on the sixth of September and I gave her the bag.
All of it. The twenty-two notebooks, the box, the three that are her mother’s.
She sat in my front room and read the 2006 entry — the four lines — and she said: “He wrote it down.”
And then she said: “He wrote it down and he never said anything for nineteen years.”
