And Dinah Lowther was standing eighteen inches to my left holding her granddaughter when I said it.
And she did not react at all, which at the time I took for agreement.
What the picture was for.
Nothing, in the end.
It is in a folder on my phone and I have opened it about nine times in fifteen months.
It never went to a solicitor, because he did not contest anything. It never went to anybody at Kettleby, because I did not have to; his mother was there.
I took a photograph of my husband kissing a woman for a purpose that I had not named to myself, and then I never needed it, and I still have it.
And on about the fourth time I opened it I noticed something.
You cannot see their faces properly. It is from behind and to the left and it is not good.
What you can see, in the bottom corner, is my own hand holding a sling.
Opal is in it.
Corey.
He is thirty-one and he is in the same work and he is with somebody else now, not Jana.
He pays and he is not difficult about it and he sees the girls when he is back, about four times a year, at his mother’s, which she arranges and does not discuss with him.
And he has never once apologised to me and he is not going to, because he does not think he has anything to apologise for except being found out.
And in the November he said one thing to me on a doorstep that I have not been able to let go.
He said: “You brought my mother.”
Not you brought the girls. Not you lied about surprising me.
That is what he has. Fifteen months on, the thing that man cannot get past is that I flew his mother to a port.
And he is right, and it is the worst thing I did, and it is also the thing I would do again, and I have not worked out how both of those can be true.
And Jana, who was twenty-seven and who said the thing about it being awkward.
She said it and it was unpleasant and I am not going to make her kind.
And in the January I found out, from Shauna, one fact about her that I had not gone looking for.
