The thing I had to say to him in the fourth week of that nine was the 2021 drawer.
We met at the place on Linnet Way, which I chose because it is the retail park he sat in for two and a half hours on the Thursday and because I wanted both of us to know that I knew.
He got there first. He had got me a coffee and not drunk his own.
I did it badly. I had a whole run-up planned about 1999 and my mother and the curtains, and what actually came out, about forty seconds in, was:
"There's a transfer in my desk. Odile Rennie drew it up in November 2021. It's signed by nobody."
He put his cup down.
"Twenty twenty-one."
"Yes."
"So when I asked you in February—"
"I'd already not done it. Twice."
He sat back and looked out of the window at a trolley bay for about eleven seconds.
Then he said: "Did you ever think about telling me?"
"Every time you asked."
"And?"
"And then you'd have asked me why, and I'd have had to say it out loud."
"Say what out loud?"
And I said, "That I'm frightened. Still. At thirty-eight. About a house I paid for myself."
He did not say anything to that for a while.
Then he said the thing that was fair, and he said it quietly, which made it worse.
"You let me go and tell my mother."
"You told your mother a thing that wasn't true. That part is yours and I'm not taking it."
"I know it is." He turned the cup round on the saucer. "But you were in the doorway, Mira. You heard me say it to her face and you took the cake in."
He is right.
I heard him do it, and five months later I let a seventy-four-year-old woman load an SUV.
We sat there for another twenty minutes and neither of us had anything else, and when we got up he said one more thing in the car park that I have thought about more than any of it.
He said: "I wasn't trying to take your house."
And I said, "I know."
And he said, "No — I mean I never once wanted it. I wanted to be able to say it in that flat."
Which is not a defence of anything.
It is, however, the single truest sentence that man has said to me in six years, and he said it standing between two parked cars at a retail park.
