He is still doing well. He drives a better car than he did.
Merrit Vance resigned in July. She wrote to me in August, unprompted, two pages.
She says she submitted that nomination on his instruction and did not read it properly. I believe about eighty percent of that.
The part I believe entirely is the last paragraph, where she says she had assumed for six years that I was a woman who did not want to be involved, because that is what she had been told, and that she had thought unkind things about me at Christmas parties.
She was the fourth person to tell me some version of that in three months.
And me.
I went back to work on the second of September, 2025.
Not to Ravensmoor High. To Brightwater, three days a week, covering science across the upper primary and one year eight class.
Ruth Ojo did that, and she did it correctly through the district and there was an interview and I want that stated because two people have implied otherwise.
But she rang me on the eleventh of June and said there was going to be a vacancy and that she would think it was a waste if I did not apply, and I cried in a car park for the second time that summer.
Twelve years out. It has been extremely hard. I could not work the register system for three weeks and a fifteen-year-old had to show me twice.
I earn about a third of what I would have if I had stayed in 2013, and I will never make that up, and that is simply true and there is no version where it isn’t.
The children.
Torin is eighteen. He has not forgiven himself for throwing the card in the bin instead of bringing it to me, and I have told him about nine times that a seventeen-year-old is not responsible for the adults in his house, and it has not landed yet. It will take a while.
Vela is sixteen and is the angriest and is the one I worry about.
Gideon, Marlow and Ottilie are, as far as anybody can tell, all right, which the counsellor says is normal for the middle and also says means nothing yet.
Sunny is eight.
She did not know what she had done. For about two weeks she thought she was in trouble, and one evening in late May she asked me, in the bath, whether Daddy was sad because of her.
I had to sit on the floor of that bathroom and explain to a seven-year-old that she had asked an entirely reasonable question about a piece of paper, and that everything that happened afterward was because of what was on the paper and not because she asked.
I do not know whether it went in.
She has a therapist. Fortnightly, since July. It costs a hundred and ten dollars an hour and it is the first line in my budget and it will be the last thing I ever cut.
The last thing.
I have the six cards.
Ruth Ojo gave two of them back to me in June, in an envelope — Sunny’s and Vela’s. Torin’s came out of a bathroom bin. The other three were on the sideboard where they had been since the Monday.
Six index cards in one man’s handwriting.
Dad’s always been there for us.
He never misses anything.
My dad’s my best friend.
He does the school run.
Dad taught me to ride a bike.
My dad does everything for us.
That fourth one — he does the school run — was for Marlow, who is eleven, and who has been driven to school by me every single day of her life apart from about six.
I have thought about which of the six is the worst and I keep landing on the fifth.
Dad taught me to ride a bike.
That was Ottilie’s. She was nine.
He bought the bike. In 2021, at Corran Cycles, for four hundred and ten dollars, and he made her tell her teacher he’d bought it.
I taught that child to ride it. In the car park behind the leisure centre, over two weekends in September of 2021, seven sessions, and there is a photograph of the moment she got it because Vela was there and filmed it.
He wrote out a sentence for a nine-year-old to say into a microphone, and the sentence was a thing he had watched me do from a car.
