I was on that path for about nine seconds in total.
A copy of the loan agreement. All eleven pages.
A copy of page three, with the signature on it, enlarged, because at that size nobody can pretend.
And one sheet of plain paper with a single figure on it, printed, which is the total I paid between 2009 and 2019 including interest.
Four lines of arithmetic on the back, in case anybody wanted to check it.
No note. Nothing in my handwriting at all.
My mother has rung nine times since.
I have not answered one. I am not going to this year and I have told two people that out loud so that it is harder to go back on.
She has not left a message. In nine calls. Which tells me she has not yet worked out what she would say, and I am not going to help her with it.
My father has not rung at all.
Not once, in eleven weeks. Which is, I think, the most honest thing that man has done in a decade — and I am aware of how that sounds and I mean it.
Austyn came back four weeks ago.
He stood on the step this time. He did not come in and he did not try to.
He got about two sentences in before he started crying, which I was not ready for and did not enjoy and have not told anybody about until now.
He said the word loft and then could not continue for about forty seconds.
He is not forgiven. We are not fixed. I do not know whether we ever will be and I have stopped needing to know this month.
But he has asked me for nothing since. Not one thing, in four weeks, which in thirty-five years of knowing that man is entirely unprecedented.
He has also cancelled the Bahamas. I found that out from somebody else entirely, about three weeks after it happened, and I have never mentioned it to him and I am not going to.
I have given him one condition and it is the only one I have.
Whatever he has to say about any of this, he says it to Wrenna first.
Not to me. Not to our parents.
To the fourteen-year-old who spent nine days in a hospital bed and has never once asked where any of them were.
If he can manage that, we can talk. If he cannot, then he and I are finished, and he knows it, and he has not argued about it.
