I did not say anything about it. I put it in the bin and I did not mention it and then I sat on the landing for a while.
It has happened twice more since and I have never once brought it up and I am not going to.
Because that is what five years of it actually leaves. Not a number in a court document.
A girl of fifteen who has everything she needs and who still, some days, without deciding to, puts half of something away for later.
I sent sixty transfers. I never missed one. I used to think that was what it meant to be her father.
It turns out you can do a thing perfectly for five years and still not have done the only thing that was required — which was to ask somebody a question I did not want the answer to.
It would have taken about eleven seconds.
I had two hundred and sixty Sundays.
There is one more thing and then I have finished.
In the October, about two months after she moved in, Talise asked me something at the kitchen table, out of nowhere, while she was doing homework.
She said: were you angry with me? When you got off the plane.
And I said yes.
She looked up. I think she had expected me to say something else.
I said: I got on that plane to tell you off. I had it all worked out. I had a whole speech about the laptop money.
And my daughter said: I know. Grandma told me you were coming.
I had not told anybody I was coming. I had booked that flight at eleven at night and told nobody.
She knew. My mother rang her that same night and told her that her father was flying in because he had had enough of her.
So my daughter went into school the next morning knowing that her father was on his way to be angry with her — and she went in anyway, and sat on a planter, and ate half a roll, and waited.
She has told me she spent that whole morning working out what she was going to say to me.
I asked her what she had settled on.
And she said: I was going to say sorry.
That is where five years put a fifteen-year-old.
She had done nothing. She had been hungry and top of her year and had protected me every single week for five years, and she had spent a morning rehearsing an apology for a laptop she never received.
That is the sentence I would give to anybody two thousand miles from a child.
They will apologise. Whatever is happening to them, if you are far enough away and you only ever ask the easy questions, they will get there first and they will apologise to you.
And you will feel, for about four seconds, like a man who was right.
