And Idris said from the back: “Were you ever going to tell us he’d be there?”
And I said I did not know he would be.
And he said: “No, but — if you’d known.”
And I had to sit with that for about a mile, because the honest answer is that I would have told them on the morning, in the car park, at the last possible second, so that there was no time for anybody to decide not to go in.
So I said that.
And there was a silence, and then Cai said: “Yeah. That’s what we thought.”
Not angry. Just — filed. The way you confirm a thing you have already worked out about somebody.
Sixteen years old, and my sons had a working model of how their mother manages information, and it was accurate, and they had had it for a while.
I have thought about that more than the foyer, and considerably more than the stage.
What I have had to take.
And here is mine, because I am not going to write four thousand words in which one man is the whole problem.
In the January of 2018 Dominic wrote to my sons.
One letter, addressed to both of them, care of me, at the old house. Four sides, handwritten.
They were eight.
I did not give it to them.
I read it twice and I put it in the box file in the wardrobe with the court papers and I have moved house once since then and it came with me.
My reasons — and I have had to say all of these out loud to a woman called Halla on Wednesdays, which is a very different thing from thinking them — were as follows.
He had not seen them in four years. He had paid nothing in four years. The letter arrived eleven days before a hearing about arrears.
And there is a paragraph in it, on the third side, about how he would love to see them and how it has always been made impossible for him.
So I decided, at thirty-six, on my own, at a kitchen table, that it was a tactical document, and I did not hand it to two eight-year-olds.
I think I was right about the letter.
I know I was wrong to keep it for seven years after that.
Because whatever it was for, it was addressed to them. And every year I did not mention it, the not-mentioning became a bigger thing than the letter, until by about 2022 there was no version of telling them that did not require me to explain why I had not told them in 2018.
And that is exactly the shape of what his mother did, and what I have criticised that family for since 2013, and I did the same thing in my own wardrobe for seven years.
What I did with it.
I gave it to them on the twenty-ninth of June, three weeks after Seren’s phone call, with the box file on the kitchen table.
Not because I had become brave. Because Rafe existed now, and there was going to be a version of all this coming at them from the other direction, and I was not going to be caught.
I told them what it was, when it came, and that I had made a decision about it in 2018 that was mine and that they were entitled to be angry about.
Idris read it first. He read it twice, the same way I had.
And then he passed it to his brother and went and stood by the back door with his hands on his head, which is what that boy has done since he was four when something is too big.
Cai read it once and put it down and said: “He spelled Idris wrong.”
Which he had. With a y. On the envelope and twice inside.
Their father wrote his son’s name wrong four times in a four-page letter and nobody at that kitchen table, including me, had noticed until a sixteen-year-old said it out loud.
What happened afterwards.
They wrote to him. Both of them, one letter, in the July, which they did not show me and which I did not ask to see.
They asked to meet him once. Not at his house. In a café in Halbrook, on neutral ground, with me sitting somewhere else in the same café, which was Cai’s condition and which I thought was very sensible and slightly heartbreaking.
He came. I will give him that, and I have to give it to him because it is the only thing I have to give him in this entire account.
Forty minutes. I could see the back of his head.
And what my sons have told me about it is this.
He spent the first ten minutes explaining. The middle twenty on the subject of what I had done. And the last ten asking them about their subjects, which Idris says was “actually all right, he was quite interested.”
And at the end he said he would be in touch about doing it again.
That was the twenty-sixth of July, 2025.
He has not been in touch. It is now fourteen months.
And the thing Dominic actually said, on the stairs at Tannery Hall, about twenty minutes after the ceremony.
I was on my way out and he came down four steps and stood in front of me, and Seren was at the bottom with Rafe, and there were still people everywhere.
And he said: “You could have told me.”
Not are they all right. Not is that Cai. Not one question about a boy who had just taken the highest mark in the state.
***You could have told me.***
And I said: told you what, Dominic?
And he said: “That they were doing this. Any of it. I’d have — ” and then he stopped, because he could not finish that sentence in a public stairwell with his wife eleven feet away, and because there is no end to it that survives being said out loud.
