Rhydian landed the following evening. He went straight to his brother’s.
I did not destroy him.
Which is what she asked for, in two words, with four hours left, in the only sentence she had the strength to produce.
I have thought about that every week since and I have come to a conclusion that I am fairly sure she would accept.
She did not actually want him destroyed. She was eighty and furious and her son had not come.
What she wanted was for me to have the means to do it — so that for the first time in twenty years, whatever happened next would be up to me.
I filed the documents.
That is all. I did not have to do anything clever and I did not have to make a speech in anybody’s living room.
The trust did its own work. It took four months, two meetings, and a woman in an office in a town I had never been to saying this is all perfectly clear, Mrs Vance in a slightly bored voice.
That is what twenty years comes down to in the end.
Somebody bored, in an office, reading a page and agreeing with it, and then asking whether you want a copy for your records.
I sold the house in the June.
I did not tell Rhydian until it was done. There was nothing he could have done about it, and I wanted one thing in twenty years to happen without a discussion first.
That is the only part of this that was spite, and I have decided to keep it.
I have a flat now.
Two rooms, near a park, eleven minutes’ walk from a decent library, with a window that gets the morning.
I have been back at work since the September — not the old career, something smaller and nearer and perfectly all right.
Everything in it is mine and nothing in it needs me.
He is renting a flat near his brother.
The woman from Maui lasted until about the August, which I know because somebody told me and because I did not ask them to stop.
I have seen him twice, both times at solicitors’ offices, both times across a table.
He has got older in eleven months in a way that twenty years did not manage, and I noticed it, and I did not feel what I expected to feel.
