It was: this time she’s going to see it.
That came before anything else. Before the girls. Before Corey. Before any of it.
And the eleven weeks, which I have described as being perfectly normal with a man on a ship.
And in the April I made myself go back through the actual messages, because Nuala asked me what normal had consisted of.
There are about four hundred of them between the twenty-third of April and the eleventh of July.
And they are not normal. They are better than normal.
I sent him more in those eleven weeks than in the eleven before it. Photographs of the girls most days. A video of Goldie doing something with her hands on the ninth of May.
And on the second of June I sent him a long one, at night, about how hard it had been and how much I was looking forward to him being home.
And every word of that was true, which is the part I cannot get round.
I was not performing. I did want him home. I was twenty-nine with two babies and I was on my knees.
And I was also, at the same time, keeping a man warm so that he would not have any reason to say anything to me before the eleventh of July.
Both of those, in the same messages, for eleven weeks.
What I did on the twenty-fourth of June.
I rang her.
And I told her that the girls and I were going to go up and meet the ship, and that I thought she should come, because she had not met them properly yet either and because it would be lovely.
And that is what I said to a woman of fifty-nine.
And she said yes straight away and she was delighted about it, and she paid me back for the ticket the week after and I took it.
And I knew what she was going to see.
And the breakfast at half seven on the Saturday, which I have put in as a detail and which I should sit in.
Forty minutes, the two of us and the girls, in a hotel dining room.
And she talked about what she was going to say to him and what she had brought for them, and she had a bag with two little things in it that she had wrapped.
