So there is a small boy in Pellhaven who is going to be told the truth about his father by two women who were lied to by him in different rooms, and who have agreed, in writing, with a mediator, on the words.
And the last thing.
The hangers.
I went back to the house once, in the July of this year, with Oriel Prentice’s letter in my bag and a man from a removals firm in a van outside, to get my things.
He was not there. That was arranged.
Everything was more or less as I had left it in the April of 2025, which was its own kind of information.
And I went upstairs, because I had decided I was going to, and I opened her door.
He had not touched it in two and a quarter years.
Her desk. Her posters. A mug on the windowsill. And the wardrobe door open the way it had been on the eighteenth of April, 2024, with nine wire hangers on the rail.
I had got that detail wrong for two years, by the way. I have told this story four times and every time I have said empty hangers knocking together, as though there had been a draught.
There is no draught in that room. The window has not been opened since 2023.
They were not knocking. They were still. They had been still for two and a quarter years, and what I had actually heard on the eighteenth of April, 2024, was myself coming up those stairs fast enough to move the air in a room.
I made that sound. I have been telling people for two years that the house gave me a sign.
I took the hangers.
Not the posters, not the desk, not the mug. Nine wire hangers from a dry cleaner’s, which cost nothing, and which are now in a wardrobe in a flat in Pellhaven with my daughter’s clothes on them.
She saw them in the August and worked out what they were in about a second and a half, and she did not say anything about it, and neither did I.
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