He asked to see her on the fourth of November this year.
I said no.
And I have not moved on it and I am not going to for some time, and it is not punishment and I have had to work out how to say why.
It is this.
Marnie is eighteen months old. She does not know she has that mark. She will find out — properly, as a fact about herself — at about four, the way I did.
And the first thing she learns about her own back cannot be that a man once walked out of a room over it.
Not at four. Not at eight. Maybe at twenty, from me, sitting down, in order, and with him in the room to answer for himself.
She gets fifteen years first.
And then there is my mother, and this is the part I did not see coming.
I rang her in the October, five months after, and asked her one question.
