And in the April I asked Vida one more thing, which I had to make myself do.
I asked whether he had ever said anything about me.
And she said: “Only that you weren’t up to it.”
Not unkindly. It is what he had told her and he had believed it and he had been protecting me with it since 2019.
What has changed.
We say her name.
That is the whole of it and it sounds like nothing and it is not nothing.
Since about the February, Bryony is a person in our house. Not constantly. But she comes up, and neither of us flinches, and in the March we did the fourteenth properly for the first time — the two of us, an hour, nothing dramatic.
And Saul was different for about a month afterwards in a way I have not got words for.
And his mother Vida — who has known the name since 2019, which I found out in the April and which took the legs out of me for a week — said one thing to me in the summer.
