She and I speak about once a fortnight. We are not friends either. We are two women of different ages who found out the same thing from different directions, and there is nobody else on earth either of us can say some of these sentences to.
Cade.
He is nineteen.
He gave up a year of his life to a threat an eighteen-year-old had no way of testing, and he did it for me, and I cannot give it back.
He is in this house now. He has his room and he has the warehouse job until the September and then he is doing the course he was going to do in 2025.
We are not fixed. He does not talk to me about the year and I have stopped asking, on advice, and we had the worst hour of my life in the August when he finally said the thing he had been holding, which was: “You could have asked me one proper question in eighteen years, Mum, and you never did.”
I could not argue with any of it, so I did not.
And he is extraordinary with that baby. Nadine brings her over on a Saturday and my son holds his half-sister on his shoulder with one hand like a man who has done it a thousand times, which, for two days in the June, he had.
And the suitcase itself, which is the one object in this that I have asked to keep and have not been allowed.
It is in an evidence store. It is exhibit something-or-other and I will see it again in the spring, in a courtroom, in a photograph.
It is not Nadine’s. That is the detail that got me.
It is my mother’s. Brown, hard-sided, broken zip, and a corner my father taped up with silver tape in about 1994 on a ferry.
It went to my mother’s in 2016 with some of my things in it when we had the loft done, and it did not come back, and I had forgotten it existed.
So at some point between 2019, when she died, and 2022, when that flat was rented, my husband took a suitcase out of my dead mother’s house, and used it to carry things to another woman’s address — and three of the things he carried in it were my mother’s rings.
Nadine did not know any of that. She picked it up because it was in the bottom of a wardrobe and it was the only thing in that flat big enough.
And my son carried it up my path in the rain on the eighteenth of June without knowing either, because he was four when he last saw it.
Three people moved that case around for ten years and I am the only one who knew whose it was, and I did not see it until it was open on my own hall floor.
And the last thing.
The messages.
A year of them. Every week a call that rang out. Most nights a text. Three hundred and eleven of them, I have since counted, because they are all still in my phone.
