Eleven months of that and we have never discussed it. That is the single kindest thing anybody has done for me in my life.Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a woman who spotted a packet and swapped two bowls under a table.
I did that, and it worked, and it produced a chain of events that ended with my husband out of my house and an envelope in a drawer becoming a matter for other people.
But I had four minutes and a car key and a house in my own name, and I did not leave.
I stayed and I built a case, because six months of small kind sentences had made me a woman who needed permission from somebody else to believe her own eyes.
If somebody close to you has started telling you, gently, that you are confused —
check the dates.
Not the symptoms. Anybody can dispute a symptom, including you, especially you.
Check when it started. Write the date down.
Then go and find out what was already on paper three weeks before that.
Because the thing about a plan is that it has to be written down somewhere first.
Somebody has to ring a solicitor. Somebody has to request a form. Somebody has to book an appointment with a specialist and put a reference number on a letter.
None of that can be done from inside a person’s head. All of it leaves a date.
And a date is the only thing in this entire story that cannot be argued with by a man in a kind voice.
And the last person who ever thinks to go and look is the person it is being written about.
