Twelve months. And the first thing out of me was about a garment.
I have gone over it with Halla perhaps nine times and the answer is always the same and I do not like it: it was the only question in the room I was certain I could survive the answer to.
What I did with the four hours.
I would like to say I was magnificent.
What I actually did for the first forty minutes was ask her questions about whether she was sure.
Was she certain it was that block of flats. Was she certain about the dates. Had she seen the certificate herself. Could there be another explanation for a man coming out of a building with shopping.
My daughter sat on my sofa with his son on her shoulder and was cross-examined by her own mother for the best part of an hour.
And at some point she put her hand into her coat pocket and got out a folded piece of paper and put it on the arm of the sofa and did not say anything.
It was a photocopy of the birth certificate.
She had brought it because she had known — on a bus, at six in the morning, at nineteen — exactly how her mother was going to behave.
That is what I have to live with out of that morning. Not the shock.
That she came prepared for me.
What happened when he came home.
He did not come home.
At about half two Tess said she had to go for the bus and I said no.
And that was the first correct thing I did in two and a half years, and I did it because she was standing in my hall putting a baby into a sling.
I packed a bag in eleven minutes. I took the documents out of the drawer in the front room — my passport, the girls’ red books, the marriage certificate, four years of payslips — and I put them in a carrier bag, and we got the twenty past three bus to Pellhaven.
I have never been back in that house.
He rang at twenty past six when he found it empty and he rang forty-one times between then and midnight, and I did not answer any of them, and on the Monday I had a solicitor called Oriel Prentice.
The house.
It is in his name. That was true.
It was not, it turns out, the whole truth, which is what twenty-two years of being told a thing by one person does to you.
I have been in that house since 2003 and I have paid into it — not the mortgage, but everything else, for twenty-two years, which is a thing the law has a view about and which Oriel Prentice explained to me in about nine minutes in a room in Pellhaven.
I will not set out the settlement. It has not finished and I am advised not to.
What I can say is that the number I was given in the June of this year was large enough that I had to put the letter down on a table and go and stand in a different room.
Twenty-two years of being told I had nowhere to go, by a man who had never once had a solicitor explain it to me, because why would he.
Nine minutes. That is what it cost to find out. I could have had those nine minutes in 2015.
And the forty-one calls that night, which I have kept and which Oriel Prentice has a copy of.
They start at 18:22 and they stop at 23:58.
The first nine are just missed calls. Then there are voicemails, and they go through the stages in order, and anybody who has ever been in this will recognise the sequence.
Eleven of them are reasonable. Ring me, I think there’s been a misunderstanding.
Then four that are about Tess — what she has told me, what she is like, what she has always been like.
Then one at about half nine which is the only one that frightened me, and which is six seconds long, and which I am not going to transcribe.
And then from about eleven they change completely, and the last six are a man asking me to come home in a voice I had not heard since his mother died in 2016.
I listened to all forty-one on the Sunday, in a flat in Pellhaven, with my daughter asleep in the next room and a three-week-old on my chest.
It took two and a half hours because I kept stopping.
And the thing that got me was not the frightening one. It was number thirty-four, at 22:41, in which he says: Av, come on. Who’s going to do the bins?
