She drove eight hours. She parked across the road from my building at about four in the afternoon and she sat in that car for two hours.
She saw us come back from the shop. She has told me what I was wearing.
Then she drove eight hours home and she never knocked, and she never told my father she went.
Seven years she has had that, and she gave it to me on a Sunday morning in her own kitchen, about nineteen hours after I turned up.
I asked her why she did not get out of the car.
And she said: because you looked all right, love.
She said it as though it were an answer. And after about four months I worked out that it was one.
She had driven eight hours to find out whether she had ruined my life, and when it turned out she had not, she went home, because the only thing that would have made her knock was me not coping.
She did not come for me. She came for the information.
I have not said that to her and I am not going to.
PART 5
And there is one more thing I have to put down, because people keep making me sound better than I am.
That Saturday was not a coincidence.
Leo asked to meet them. That is true.
I picked the day.
It was the tenth anniversary. I knew there would be people in that house. I knew there would be a table with his photograph on it.
I have told myself various things about why. That it was the only weekend I could get off. That it felt right.
It was not that.
I wanted them to be standing in a room with their son’s photograph on a table when they found out, and I wanted about twenty people to be there when it happened.
That is what I actually did.
My father came out onto that porch and took hold of my wrist in front of all of them and said:
