Audrey is in a different flat now. Ground floor, no stairs, and Dalton pays four hundred a month toward it, which comes out of his account and which we agreed in writing in the November and which I was the one who suggested.
She has not apologised and she is not going to. She is seventy-four and she made a 999 call about her son's wife and the only way she can live with that is the version where I am the kind of woman you would have to make one about.
I have met her twice since. Both at Bette's, both for about forty minutes, both perfectly civil.
Bette deleted the video. She told me so in a text in the October, unprompted, which was the first decent thing that woman has done since 2019.
My mother came down in the September.
I told her about the doorstep and about the drawer and she listened to all of it without saying anything, and then she said:
"You've had those papers four years?"
"Yes."
And Delphine Tallow said, "Mira. I didn't lose that house because I signed a form."
I said, "I know."
"No, you don't. You've built the whole thing round the form." She put her cup down. "I lost it because for five years I didn't say what I wanted out loud, to him or to anybody, and then it was too late to start."
Which is the only genuinely useful thing anybody has said to me about any of this, and which I am still working on.
Give me that, hold it. Move out of the way, sweetheart, these are heavy.
She said that on my own front step, pushing a potted peace lily into my chest so that my hands were full, in front of her daughter's phone and about fifteen people on Fernwick Row.
And then she told me I was not on the deed, pleasantly, the way you correct somebody's spelling.
She believed it. Her son had told her so in her own front room in March over a glass of sherry with twenty-five people there.
And the only other person in that room who knew it was not true was standing in the kitchen doorway holding two plates of cake, deciding, in about three seconds, that it was easier to let it stand.
