Six years.
Four of them, by name, with dates, in her own handwriting — and in two cases with the name of the hotel.
She was not guessing. Somebody was telling her, or she was looking, and I have decided not to work out which because it does not change anything and because I think I know.
And she did not tell me, because if I had known, I would have left.
And if I left, there was nobody else.
Not a son. Not a second son, eleven minutes away.
Not a niece, not a neighbour, and not a budget for a home — she could have afforded one for about four years and no longer, and she had done that arithmetic too.
That is the arithmetic she was doing. One daughter-in-law, and after that a corridor.
I have tried to be angry with her about it. I have had eleven months and about two hundred attempts and I cannot get there for longer than an afternoon.
PART 5
In the seventh letter she wrote this line, in a hand that was already going:
I know what I am doing. I will tell you when I no longer need you.
I have read that sentence perhaps four hundred times.
It is the most honest sentence anybody in that family has ever produced, in speech or on paper, in the twenty years I was in it.
She was not deceiving me out of cowardice. She was not protecting her son.
She made a calculation about her own last years. She chose.
And then she wrote it down — so that I would know afterwards that it had been a choice and not an accident, and that she had been awake inside it the whole time.
That is not a kindness. I want to be precise about this, because people keep calling it one.
It is a confession written in advance by somebody who intended to keep doing the thing she was confessing to, for as long as she needed it.
And then she kept her word.
The eleventh letter is dated four days before that night. The writing is barely hers, and it goes downhill across the line.
Three words.
Go now, love.
Four days before. She would have needed help to get a pen; there is a nurse who remembers bringing her one and thinking nothing of it.
A woman who could not speak, could not sit up, and could not lift her own cup — and she got somebody to fetch a pen so that she could write three words to a daughter-in-law who was asleep in the chair four feet away.
