And the last thing.
I did see Rina in the June.
We sat in her car in a retail park for about an hour and a half and neither of us was good at it.
And at the end of it she asked me the question I had been dreading since the October, and she asked it without any edge at all.
She said: "If Mum hadn't said that — would you have come and found me?"
And I said yes.
And she looked at me for a bit and said: "I believe you."
And then: "It's just that we'll never know."
That is the whole of it and there is nothing after it.
I will go to my grave knowing that at twenty past four on the eighteenth of October, 2025, in a car park, I was a woman who had driven two hours to do a decent thing in a side room — and there is no version of my life in which anybody, including me, can ever prove it.
May you like
My husband took the final available chair from me while I was eight months pregnant and gave it to his mistress instead
