I would have got him into that clinic within two years and I would have told myself he chose it.
He knew that. He knew it in 2022 and he was correct, and the thing he chose instead of telling me was five years of fraud and a dead woman who was not dead.
That is not a defence of him. He had about nine hundred better options and he took the worst one available.
But I cannot sit here and write that I would have been no trouble, because I would have been the exact kind of trouble that made a man kill off his own mother at a kitchen table.
The funeral.
It was on the sixth of November at a crematorium outside Lindhaven and there were nine of us.
Grady. Verity and Pell. Oyin, the nurse, on her day off. Two women from the unit. A cousin. A neighbour from the road Imelda had lived on until 2019, who had brought dahlias, which I have not been able to think about calmly since.
