Nobody asked anything in the room. Four people came and found me afterwards.
And the one I think about is Deb, who does the service charges and who has been there since 1998 and who taught me how to read a rent roll when I was fourteen.
She came into my office at about five and shut the door and said: "Love. Did he know what he was taking it for?"
And I said yes. His mother.
And Deb sat down on the arm of my father's old chair and said: "Right. Well. That's the worst version, then."
"Because if he'd been buying a boat you could hate him and be done."
She was there four days later when I signed the compensation order paperwork and she has never mentioned it again.
Verity.
We are not friends and we have never pretended to be.
She is thirty-two and she still lives four hours away and she is still engaged, to a man called Pell who has known about the visits since 2019 and who drove her, sometimes, and who I have met twice.
