There is a test. It is a blood test and it takes about six weeks.
Grady has never had it.
He was twenty-four when his mother was diagnosed and he was standing in that consultant's office when the word inherited was said out loud, and he has spent nine years not finding out.
And in the March of 2022, four months into a relationship with a woman who had started talking about children, he made a decision at a kitchen table in Tarrow — Verity's kitchen table, because he drove there to say it to somebody first.
He said his mother had died in 2018.
Because if his mother was alive, there was a diagnosis. And if there was a diagnosis, there was a test. And if there was a test, there was a woman sitting opposite him who would want him to take it, and who would be right.
So he killed his mother off in conversation, and then he paid twenty-nine hundred a month for her, out of my father's company, for five years.
