Not in front of strangers. The crowd was not the point; nobody in that terminal knew who we were and nobody stopped.
I wanted Dinah Lowther to see her son do it with her own eyes, so that for the rest of my life nobody in that family could tell me I had got it wrong or exaggerated it or driven him to it.
And I had a reason for that which goes back further than this.
And the fortnight in 2021, which I have used here as my reason and which I have never set out properly.
It was not an affair. It was messages, over about six weeks, with a woman at Kettleby called Orla, and some of them were what they were.
And it came out, and there was a fortnight of it, and then we carried on.
And I have described that fortnight, for four years, as me being talked out of what I could see.
And in the May I made myself remember who did the talking.
Dinah said her sentence at that table. That happened and I have it word for word.
And my own mother said something as well, about a week later, and so did my sister, and so did a friend of mine at work — four separate people, all of whom thought he was worth another go, because he was twenty-seven and because we had been together six years.
And so did I.
I decided to stay in 2021. Me, at the end of a fortnight, on my own, in a bath, for reasons that were mine.
And for four years I have been carrying a single sentence from one woman as the reason I did not leave.
Because one sentence from a mother-in-law is something a person can be owed for.
The reason.
His sister Row.
In 2021, before the girls, Corey did something much smaller than this with somebody at Kettleby and it got out, and there was about a fortnight of it, and I was told a version in which it was not what it looked like.
And Dinah said something to me at that kitchen table that I have carried for four years.
She said: “He’s a good lad, Pia. Don’t let people fill your head.”
***Don’t let people fill your head.***
And in the April of 2025, when Shauna rang me, the first thing I thought — and I know this because I remember thinking it, and it frightens me now — was not about my marriage.
