And that is exactly the shape of what his mother did, and what I have criticised that family for since 2013, and I did the same thing in my own wardrobe for seven years.
What I did with it.
I gave it to them on the twenty-ninth of June, three weeks after Seren’s phone call, with the box file on the kitchen table.
Not because I had become brave. Because Rafe existed now, and there was going to be a version of all this coming at them from the other direction, and I was not going to be caught.
I told them what it was, when it came, and that I had made a decision about it in 2018 that was mine and that they were entitled to be angry about.
Idris read it first. He read it twice, the same way I had.
And then he passed it to his brother and went and stood by the back door with his hands on his head, which is what that boy has done since he was four when something is too big.
Cai read it once and put it down and said: “He spelled Idris wrong.”
Which he had. With a y. On the envelope and twice inside.
Their father wrote his son’s name wrong four times in a four-page letter and nobody at that kitchen table, including me, had noticed until a sixteen-year-old said it out loud.
