I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

I asked whether he knew what she was eating.

And he did not answer for a long time, and then he said: I knew it wasn’t right.

I said that is not what I asked you.

And he said: no. I didn’t know. I didn’t ask.

Then he said: I stopped going round there in about 2022.

He lives eleven minutes from his mother’s house and he stopped going round in 2022, and he has told me since that he cannot remember making that decision either, which I believe.

That is what he did instead of fixing it. He moved himself to where he could not see it, and then the not seeing became the arrangement, and three years went past.
PART 7

Now the part I was least ready for, and it undid me more than the bank statements did.

My daughter has never once thought I abandoned her.

That is what everybody assumes when I tell this. It is what I assumed for about nine days, and it is wrong, and the truth is considerably harder to carry.