She did four years of after-school for those two, from 2016 to 2020, and she would not take money for three of them, and in the end I had to start paying her electricity bill by standing order and telling her it was an administrative error at the energy company, which she has never believed and has never challenged.
In the car park afterwards, Dominic walked past about six feet from her and did not know who she was.
And she watched him go and then she said, to me, in her ordinary voice: “Is that him?”
And I said yes.
And she said: “He’s smaller than I thought.”
Which is not true. He is six foot one. It is the single best sentence anybody said that entire weekend.
Where things are.
Idris and Cai are seventeen. They are in the upper sixth at Gatley Bank Academy, which is an ordinary state school, and they both have offers to read, respectively, engineering and physics.
The medals are in a drawer. Both of them, in the same drawer, in the kitchen, with the takeaway menus, because when I put them on the shelf in the front room Cai took them down again and said it was embarrassing.
I still work at the depot. Four days, and the Saturday at the shop until the September, when I stopped, because for the first time since 2012 I did not need the second one.
And I see Halla on Wednesdays, which started as being about the foyer and has been about a box file since about the August.
And the photograph on the bookshelf, which I mentioned to Seren on the phone as though it were obvious and which requires an explanation.
It has been there since 2014. It is Dominic at twenty-eight, on a beach, holding two babies in one of those double slings, looking knackered and delighted.
Ivy asked me once, in about 2018, why on earth I kept it up.
And I gave her the answer I had ready, which was that they were entitled to know what he looked like.
That is true and it is not the whole of it.
