She could have woken me. I was four feet away in a chair with a coat over me.
She could have squeezed my hand and mouthed three words, the way she had been mouthing things to me for two years, and I would have understood them in about a second.
She did not. She put it in the box with the other ten, where it would only be found afterwards, which tells you she still did not quite trust herself to let me go while she could still hear me.
Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
I was not deceived about my husband.
I knew in 2019.
There was a hotel receipt in a coat pocket in the February.
There was a phone call in the June that I was in the room for, where he said I’ll ring you back in a voice I had not heard him use since about 2003.
And there was an evening in the October that I have never described to anybody, and am not going to describe here, and which settled it entirely.
I knew.
And I decided not to ask, which is not the same thing as not knowing, and I have had eleven months to stop letting myself blur those two.
Not asking is a decision. It takes effort. You have to do it again every few weeks, for years, and each time it gets slightly easier and slightly more expensive.
I made that decision about two hundred times between 2019 and that hospital room.
I told myself I was staying for her.
That is a lovely sentence and it is about seventy per cent true. I did love that woman. I still do, in the present tense, which is a strange thing to have to write.
The other thirty per cent is this.
As long as I was indispensable to his mother, I never had to answer the question of who I would be if I left.
Fifty-one years old.
Out of my own career since 2008, when I left a job I was good at because somebody had to be at home and it was obviously going to be me.
No pension of my own worth the name. A house in somebody else’s name, as I understood it at the time.
And a skill set that consists entirely of knowing how to look after one particular person who was about to die.
