I married a stranger in a hospital room so he would not die alone, and seven days later his lawyer put a green backpack in my hands and told me my husband had not been who I thought he was. What was inside it had my mother’s name on it.

Now the plastic wallet at the bottom, which is the only thing in that bag that is not paperwork.

It is a staff identification badge. Card stock in a laminate sleeve, the kind companies stopped issuing around 2005.

My mother’s photograph on it, at twenty-four. Her name. Her employee number. Issued in 1994.

I had never seen it. It was not in her things and she never mentioned it and I would have said, before that morning, that no such object existed anywhere.

He had it before he met me.

That took me about four months to be able to hold properly, and it is the reason this is not the sweet story that everybody wants it to be.

Absalom Renner did not meet a kind volunteer and have a feeling about her.

He came onto that ward with a bag already packed. He watched, from a chair, for eleven weeks before I ever spoke to him — I have since established that he was in that hospital, on and off, from the June, and that he had asked a nurse, in the July, which days the volunteers came.

He asked me nine days of questions about my mother that he already knew the answers to.

I have gone back through those nine days with a notebook, which is a thing I would advise nobody to do.

Four of his questions were not questions. They were offers.

On the second day he said: she must have been proud of you. I said I hoped so.

On the fourth he said: was she a worrier? I said yes, about everything except herself.

On the sixth he said: did she ever talk about work? And I said no, not really, she said it was the quiet end and she liked it because she could think.

And he said: mm.

One syllable, and he changed the subject to the weather, and I remember nothing else about that afternoon.

That is the moment. Out of nine days, that is the moment he had built the whole thing for and he let it go past.

He was three seconds from telling me. I have no doubt about that at all. He asked the question, got the answer that opened the door, made a small noise, and shut it.

I do not know why. I will never know why.

Ozro thinks he could not do it face to face and had always known he could not, and that the bag was never a second choice, and that he asked the question on the sixth day to find out whether he could — and found out that he could not.

I think Ozro is right and I hate it, because it means that on the sixth day of my marriage my husband ran a test on me and failed it himself.

And on the third day he asked a twenty-nine-year-old to marry him.

I have gone round and round on why it had to be a marriage, and Ozro Tull — the lawyer, who is seventy-eight and who has been extremely straight with me from the first morning — gave me the answer in one sentence in his office in the November.

He said: a widow has standing. A volunteer has none.

That is the whole of it.

The files in that bag are not his to give away. Half of them are company records and there is an agreement over the top of them and eleven families who signed it, and a stranger who turned up with a rucksack full of them would have been stopped in about a week.

A spouse is a different problem. A spouse inherits a position. A spouse can be an interested party in things a stranger cannot go near.

Nine days and a lemonade pull-tab bought me a legal standing that no journalist and no lawyer had managed to get in eleven years.

He knew that. I did not.

I have been asked more times than I can count whether I think he did it out of guilt or out of control.

My honest answer is that I think it was both, and that I have stopped believing the question has an answer, and that it took me about a year to be at peace with not knowing.

Because here is the thing about a man like that.

Guilt and control are the same muscle. He spent twenty-six years arranging outcomes and then he got a diagnosis and decided to arrange one last one, and the fact that this one was in my favour does not make it a different kind of act.

He did not confess. He did not apologise. There is no letter in that bag — I checked eleven times and Ozro confirmed there was never one.

He handed me a job.

Ozro said something in that same conversation that I have repeated since to about four people.

I asked him whether Absalom had ever discussed it with him — whether the two of them had ever sat in a room and said out loud what the marriage was for.

And he said: Mrs Renner, I’ve acted for that man for thirty-one years and he has never once told me why he wanted anything.

Then he said: he told me what to draft. He always told me what to draft.

I said that must have been difficult.

And Ozro Tull, who is seventy-eight and who had just spent nine days arranging a wedding and a death, looked at me over his glasses and said: it was restful, mostly. You get used to it. That’s the trouble with men like that — you get used to it and then you’re sixty and you’ve spent your whole career not asking.

PART 4