I was not sharp with her. I did not sound annoyed. I handed her phone back and patted her arm and sent her off across a kitchen, warmly, in about nine seconds, in front of four people.
She has told me that she decided in that nine seconds that I already knew and had made my peace with it — because why else would a woman wave that off so easily.
That is what she took away from it, and she then spent three months believing I had looked at something like that and chosen to keep Nadia anyway.
Which is why, on the night before my wedding, Dilly Mowat was in that room and did not stop it.
She laughed twice. She has never once asked me to put that down to anything.
And she went and found Nadia.
I did not think about that exchange once until the fifteenth of March, in a rented kitchen at Ardmere, when my husband told me about a taxi.
