There was no confrontation. People always want there to have been one and I have disappointed about six separate friends on this point.
I never asked him a single question.
Not one, in eleven months. Not who she was. Not how long. Not whether he loved her, which is the one everybody assumes a wife needs.
I did not need it. I had eleven letters in a shoebox with dates in them.
That is the strangest thing that woman left me, and it is worth more than the house: I will never have to wonder. There is no version of the last six years that I have to construct for myself, because somebody wrote it down as it happened.
I sent him one thing, by post, to his brother’s address, in a plain envelope.
A photocopy of the seventh letter. His mother’s handwriting. I know what I am doing. I will tell you when I no longer need you.
No note with it. No covering letter. Nothing of mine on the page at all.
He replied eleven days later.
Eleven days to look at a photocopy of his own mother’s handwriting and compose a response.
Four words.
How long did she know?
That is the only question that man has asked me since his mother died.
Not are you all right. Not what did she say at the end. Not was she frightened.
How long did she know.
I have not answered it and I am not going to, and I will tell you exactly why, because it took me about four months to be able to say it.
It is not a question about his mother.
It is a man working out how long he had been seen.
Four words, eleven days of thinking about it, and not one of them about his mother.
He is not asking what she knew. He is asking how many of those Sunday lunches he was performing at, and to whom, and whether she was looking at him the whole time.
I know the answer. She was. From 2017, across six years, at every single meal, and he never once felt it.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a laughing woman on a phone in Maui, and a dying mother, and a silver key on a broken chain.
All of that happened.
It took about ninety seconds from the laughing to the key leaving her hand, and I will have those ninety seconds until I die, and so will everybody who reads this.
