It was, for about eleven seconds, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
And then it stopped being, because a man two rows in front of me leaned over to his wife and said, “Who are they?” — and I realised that every single person in that hall had a better claim to ask that question than the man it was actually about.
The thirteen years, in the order they happened.
He left on the ninth of March, 2012. The boys were three years and one week old.
He did not leave for Seren, incidentally, whatever the version in Halbrook says. He left in the March and she came in about the December, and I have never blamed that woman for the marriage and I am not starting now.
He saw them four times in 2012 and twice in 2013. The last of those was a Saturday in the November at a soft play in Halbrook, and he was forty minutes late, and he took a work call for eleven minutes of the hour he was there.
Nothing in 2014. Nothing in 2015. A card each in 2016, posted late, with twenty pounds in each.
Then the letter in 2018, which I will come back to.
And nothing at all after that until a foyer in 2025.
What I was doing in the same period: the depot four days a week, and the shop on Saturdays from 2015, and a flat over a launderette in Gatley Bank until 2019, when I got the house.
