He did not decide anything. He writes that the doorbell went and it was a delivery and by the time he had dealt with it he had stopped being able to.
Four years of everything that followed came out of a parcel arriving at the wrong moment.
The second is about my husband.
He knew him. He has three sentences about that boy at six years old and one of them is about something he used to do with his hands when he was concentrating, which Hattie does, and which I had never once mentioned to that man.
I read that line and had to go and stand in the garden.
Because for four years I had assumed the only person left alive who had known my husband as a child was me.
Now the part that is mine.
He did not lie to me about loving me. That was true, and it was true from about the first year, and I have stopped arguing with myself about it.
What he hid was the reason he was in that lane in the first place.
And I knew.
Not the detail. Not the home, not 1991, not what he signed.
But in 2019 I was looking for batteries and I opened a drawer in his study and there was a photograph in it.
Nine or ten children on some steps in front of a building with a flat roof.
I am in it. I am about five, at the end of the second row, in a cardigan I can remember.
And so is the boy I married, on the other end, two years older, with his arms folded.
I stood in that room holding it for about four minutes.
Then I put it back in the drawer, exactly where it had been, face down, and I shut the drawer and I went and found the batteries.
I never asked him. Not once, in the four years after that.
Because if he answered me, then one of two things happened.
Either I had to leave that house — because you cannot stay in a marriage you have just found out has a reason underneath it that you were not told about.
Or I had to stay, knowing exactly what I was staying in it for.
And I was not able to do either. So I did the third thing, which was to shut a drawer.
