I accepted it because accepting it ended the call on schedule.
Eleven times she opened a door about four inches.
Eleven times I said ah, that’s lovely, I miss you too, and walked past it, and got on with what I was doing, which on at least three of those occasions was nothing at all.
There is no version of this where I did not know. There is only a version where knowing would have cost me a weekend.
It has been eleven months.
She is not in that house.
She is in mine, and she has been since the March, and she has her own income now and does not need to be there.
She is there anyway, which I have decided to take as the single best thing that has happened to me in my adult life.
It has not been easy and I am not going to write the version where it was. We have had two arguments that neither of us has fully recovered from.
One of them was about me rearranging her medication into a pill organiser without asking, in the April, which took me about four minutes and which she took — correctly — as a woman being managed in her mother’s house by a person very good at logistics.
She said: you’ve done it again.
And I had. Six weeks out of that corridor, and I had.
I have got better. I have not got good.
There is a process.
It is slow and it is not finished and I am not going to write about it, except for one thing that I think matters and that nobody warned us about.
It is her process. Not mine.
Every instinct I have — twenty-two years of them — is to take it over, resource it properly, assign it somebody competent and report back to her weekly.
And the one thing it cannot survive is me doing that.
So I sit in rooms and I say nothing and I let a thirty-one-year-old woman answer questions slowly and badly and in her own order, and it is the hardest professional discipline I have ever had to learn, and it is not professional at all.
The file went where it needed to go, in full, with Isaura’s name on it, which she asked for and which surprised me and which I have thought about a great deal since.
I did not take any of it public.
