And it goes further, and this is the one I have not said out loud to my daughters.
I signed everything.
For six years. Whatever Garrison put in front of me, at this table, with a pen already out of his pocket, with the little coloured arrows stuck down the side showing me where to go.
Forty documents. Probably more than forty. The solicitor is still counting and the number has moved twice.
Insurance. The yard. The transfer that was half finished. Four separate things to do with the house.
And I know what my signature looks like on all of them because I have now been shown every single one, in a room, over about four hours, by a woman who was very kind about it.
I did not read one of them. Not one, in six years, not a single page.
And I have told myself that was grief, and about four people have kindly agreed with me, and it was not grief.
It was simpler and worse than grief.
Reading any of it meant sitting at a desk for two hours with my husband’s name printed about four hundred times in front of me, in a font, next to numbers.
And I could not do that. And here was a man offering to do it instead, with a pen already out, saying I’ve been through it, love, it’s just here and here.
I did not fail to notice anything.
I arranged not to have to. Over six years, about forty times, with a cup of tea in my hand.
It has been eleven weeks.
There is a solicitor, and there are two people from an insurance company, and there is a file with about four hundred pages in it now.
Nobody has been arrested.
I am told that may never happen. That what is actually coming is a number in an agreement that about eleven people will ever read, in about two years, after four more meetings.
That is what this sort of thing looks like and it is nothing at all like what people imagine when I tell them.
Garrison came to the Sunday.
Six years to the day. About twenty people in this house, in and out of the kitchen, the way they have been four years running.
He brought flowers. He always brings flowers and he always puts them in the same jug.
He did not know what we had found. We had had it five days by then.
Minna walked into that kitchen with the phone in her hand.
She had not told me she was going to. She had decided it on her own, that morning, at twenty-three years old, in a house with twenty people in it.
And she asked him, out loud, in front of every single one of them, what the eleventh of July was.
And he came across that kitchen and got hold of my wrist and said four words.
Give me that.
Nobody moved. Somebody put a glass down on the counter.
And then, quieter, leaning in about four inches: it’s not what you think, Carys.
Which is a sentence a person only produces when they already know exactly what you think.
And I did not let go of that phone.
I did not say one word either. Not a sentence, not his name, nothing — I stood there with my wrist in his hand for about four seconds and looked at him.
And about twenty people in my kitchen stood completely still and watched a man of fifty-eight work out, in real time, that six years of work had just finished.
He has not been back to this house.
His solicitor writes to mine. Four letters so far, all of them very polite, none of them saying anything.
Their mother is eighty-four.
She has not been told. She is not going to be told, and that was my decision, made on my own, in about four minutes, on the Monday after.
Two of my daughters disagree with it. One of them disagrees with it loudly. We are not finished arguing about it and I do not expect to win.
The money is sitting exactly where it is sitting.
