I have decided not to do anything with that sentence. It is not a message and it is not a joke at my expense. It is just a thing a dying man said about a man who was, at that moment, paying his mother’s care home out of my father’s rent money.
Where things are.
The company is fine. That is the strange, flat truth of it. Forty-one properties do not notice.
The divorce came through in the September. There was almost nothing to divide, which I knew, and which is why the bank statement under the ring was always the whole of the message.
I sold the townhouse. I live in the flat above our office on Cardigan Street, which my father did for two years in the nineties and which everybody tells me is a bad idea.
I am seeing somebody on Wednesdays. Not a man. A therapist.
And Grady lives in Lindhaven now. He moved there in the January, which I did not expect and which I have not asked about.
He works for a builders’ merchant. He is doing his hours at a furniture project.
And the last thing.
In the August he wrote to me. One page.
He did not ask for anything and he did not apologise, which I appreciated more than I expected, because the apology would have been for the wrong list.
He wrote to tell me that he had had the test.
In the June. On his own. He did not tell Verity either.
And then he wrote the result, in one line, in the middle of a page, with a space above it and a space below it.
I am not going to put it here.
It is his, and he has told two people, and I am one of them, and I have discovered that being one of two people is a heavier thing than I would have guessed.
But I will say this, because it is mine.
When I opened that letter I was standing in my kitchen at seven in the morning, and before I read the line I already knew which way I wanted it to go.
And I want it on record that I wanted it to be the good one. That was not complicated. There was no part of me, not one, that wanted anything else.
Fourteen months after a man walked out of my wedding night and took my grandmother’s money with him, I stood in a kitchen hoping, with my whole chest, for a man I will not speak to again.
I think that is probably the end of it. Not forgiveness — I have not got there and I may not.
But I read that line and I said, out loud, to an empty flat:
“Oh, thank God.”
And then I sat down on the floor, in a dressing gown, holding a piece of paper.
Which is almost exactly where I was at four in the morning on my wedding night, holding a different piece of paper.
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