So I let it stand.
From the March to the August, my husband's mother believed her son was a joint owner of a house in Fernwick, because he told her he was and because his wife heard him do it and kept her mouth shut and ate a slice of cake.
Which means when she got in that SUV in August she was not committing an outrage.
She was, in her own head, going to stay at her son's house.
She is a difficult woman and she has been unkind to me for six years and she did not deserve what happened on that step. Both of those are true and I have had to hold them at the same time.
There were six years of smaller ones. I am going to put three down and then stop, because a list of them makes me sound like a person keeping a list, and I was.
The Christmas of 2019, at that flat, she introduced me to a neighbour as "Dalton's wife — she does something with reports."
I said, "I'm a consultant, I do—" and she said, "Mm," and turned round and asked the neighbour about her hip.
In 2022 she rang the landline, which nobody rings, and when I picked up she said, "Oh. Is the owner there?"
I said, "Speaking."
And she said, "Dalton, Mira," in the voice you use with a child who is being silly, and I laughed, because what else, and I put him on.
And at Bette's fortieth in 2021, a man I had never met asked how we'd met, and before I could speak Bette said, "Oh, Dalton rescued her from a flat in Carrow Gardens," which is a two-bedroom flat that I owned.
Every one of those is nothing. Every single one, written down, is nothing.
Six years of nothing is not nothing.
PART 4 — 1999
Now the part that is mine, and I have only ever said it out loud twice.
The papers were drawn up in 2021.
Not the February of this year. Four years ago. A solicitor in Fernwick prepared a transfer to put Dalton on that title in the November of 2021, and I paid for it, and it has been in the second drawer of the desk in my office ever since.
I never signed it.
Dalton does not know it exists. He thinks the February was the first time he asked. It was the third.
