It has been nine weeks.
The ashes are with Ines. That was mine to decide and it took me about four seconds, and she did not ask and would not have.
She has not scattered them and she does not know whether she will, and she has told me that she may leave them in a cupboard for ten years and that this is allowed.
We speak. Every fortnight or so. It is careful and neither of us pretends it is a friendship yet.
She has read the letter four times that I know of.
There is one line in it about her and it is not sentimental at all:
She does not owe me a single thing and I want it recorded somewhere in writing that I know that.
She cried at that one, in a car park, and she has told me since that it was the first true thing she had ever seen that man put in writing.
She has not told me why she stopped speaking to him.
She said one thing about it, in the second week, and it is: it was the right decision and I would make it again.
I believe her completely.
And that has not changed anything about how I feel about those four pages, and I have had to learn to hold both at the same time, and a woman on Thursdays has told me that holding both is the whole job.
The flat was cleared in the December.
There was almost nothing in it. A bed, a chair, a kettle, two years of newspapers stacked by the door.
And a drawer with about ninety coffee-shop loyalty cards in it, every one of them filled in.
He had been buying himself a coffee somewhere else in the afternoons.
I do not know why that is the detail that gets me at three in the morning, but it is.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a man who lied on a piece of cardboard.
He did lie. He lied every morning for two years with his face and his coat and the specific way he said cold one today — and I do not forgive it, and his daughter does not forgive it, and neither of us is required to.
But it is about four minutes.
I gave a man four minutes a day for two years. I gave him coffee. I never once said: where are you from.
And I thought that made me kind.
Kindness that never asks a question is not kindness. It is a routine. It is comfortable, and it lets you feel like a decent person on the way to work without ever finding out what would actually be required of you.
There is a man on that corner now.
He turned up about five weeks after. He is genuinely homeless and he is twenty-six and his name is Arlo.
I know that because I asked him on the second morning, and it was the most uncomfortable four minutes of my year, and he clearly thought I was strange.
He is from Halverston. He has a sister he has not spoken to since 2022 and he does not want to say why. He was a plasterer. He can do something with a tape measure that he has shown me twice and that I still cannot do.
I buy him a coffee. Same place, same order, same four minutes.
