And I had assumed — for twelve months, and it is what kept me sending them — that they were going into nothing. That he had blocked me, or changed the number, or deleted them without opening.
He had a second phone.
He bought it in the July of 2025 with his first wages from the warehouse, for eleven pounds, and he put my number in it and nothing else, and he read every single message I ever sent him on it, sitting on the end of a bed in Dunleigh.
He showed me in the July. Three hundred and eleven, all there, none of them deleted.
And he said: “I nearly answered one.”
And I said which.
And he got it up and turned the phone round, and it is from the ninth of March, 2026, at twenty to one in the morning, and it is not a good one. It is not even a nice one. It says:
***I don’t know if you read these. I’m going to keep sending them anyway. I’m not doing it for you, I think I’m doing it so that when you do come back you can see there wasn’t a single day I didn’t.***
And he said he typed something back to that one and looked at it for about an hour and then deleted it, because of the other phone, because of the house, because of what he had been told at eleven o’clock at night in a kitchen when he was seventeen years and three hundred and sixty-four days old.
