It took me nine days to notice what I had done.
Teague noticed on the first afternoon. He had the manners to wait until I asked him directly, and when I did he said four words: it's your father's instinct.
I put the phone down on him. I rang back about forty minutes later and apologised and he said there was nothing to apologise for, which there was.
I have told Garrick since. All of it, in one go, on the ninth day.
I had worked out a way to tell him about a third of it. I got about four minutes in and then I put the whole thing down on that table instead, because I could hear myself selecting.
The trust. The six years. The 2019 restaurant and what my father said to him and did not say to me. The button, the forty minutes, the fifteen of them I have written down above.
It took about four hours at that kitchen table, from eleven at night until nearly three.
It was not a reconciliation. Nobody held anybody. It was the worst night of our marriage by a distance, and it is not finished, and I do not know yet whether it ends anywhere good.
He said one thing in it that I will have for the rest of my life. He said: I knew. Not what it was. But I always knew there was something you had that I didn't, and I have spent six years trying to find a thing in this house that was mine.
He has not forgiven me for the six years.
I would think considerably less of him if he had, inside eleven weeks. There is a version of that man who would have forgiven it in four days to keep the peace, and I lived with that version for most of the marriage, and I am not sorry he is gone.
I have not forgiven him for the car park.
He has not asked me to. He tried once, in the third week, and got about four words in and stopped himself, which was correct.
He has told forty-one people that the company is being wound down in an orderly way over the next year rather than falling over in a weekend. That was the thing the money bought. It did not save it; it bought a door instead of a hole.
