There is no arithmetic in this world that makes those three words acceptable, in that queue, to the mother of her own grandchild, and I have not spoken to that woman properly since and I do not know when I will.
What I am telling you is that she was not calling me a leech about an allowance. She was calling me a leech about a house she had already signed away.
But she was not insulting a daughter-in-law about money that afternoon.
She was in a supermarket watching a card decline, which told her exactly how far down it had got, four feet from somebody who did not know.
And the loudest person in a room is very often the one who has just understood something four seconds earlier.
That is not an excuse and I am not offering it as one, and if anybody tries to hand it to her as one on my behalf I will say so. She chose those three words out of all the words available to a frightened woman, and the reason she had them ready is that she has thought them before.
But she did not say them to put me in my place. She said them to put something out of the room.
And then there is my father.
That trust was not built so that I would never be trapped.
That is the sentence Teague has used with me for six years and it is on the front of a document and I have let it stand because it is a lovely sentence about a dead man.
It was set up in the November of 2019.
Which is four weeks after my husband went to my father privately.
Without telling me. In a restaurant, on a Tuesday, with a printed business plan and the good shirt.
He asked him for a loan to expand that company. I did not know that meeting had happened until eleven weeks ago, and I found out from a bank, not from either of them.
My father turned him down.
And then, four weeks later, he quietly built an instrument large enough to end that company, put my name on it, filed it, and never told either of us why.
My father did not trust the man I married.
He was entitled to that. He may even have been right, and I have had eleven weeks to think about that and I am still nowhere.
