And I watched it from an upstairs window and decided I knew exactly what it was.
What I have had to take.
A great deal, and in an order I did not choose.
But if I am honest the worst of it is not the lie about his mother, and it is not the money, and it is not the test he will not take.
It is that he was right about me.
Because I have asked myself, properly, more than once, at three in the morning: if he had told me in 2022 — my mother is alive, she has this, I have a one in two chance, I don't want to know —
would I have left it?
No.
I would have been kind about it. I would have given him six months. And then I would have started. Gently, reasonably, with articles, with the phrase for the children we're going to have, with my particular way of making a thing inevitable by being endlessly understanding about it.
