Tobiah was standing about six feet away.
He had heard all of it, and he did not understand one word, and I watched him not understand it.
And then Leander looked at him — properly, for the first time — and put one hand up to his own forehead, to the white patch over his eyebrow.
And I watched my ex-husband, who has checked his reflection in every window he has ever walked past, put his own hand up to his own hairline.
It took him about eleven seconds.
He did not say anything either. He took the application out of his jacket, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket, and then he sat down on one of the plastic chairs along that wall and put his head in his hands.
That application was never filed.
The folder under my mattress went to Harrowgate and Vell the following week — to a woman I used to work with, who read the first four pages and rang me back inside an hour.
