I married my high school sweetheart at 73 — after his funeral, his lawyer knocked on my door and said: “You walked right into his TRAP.

***He asked me to stay. And I would not.***

That is how I say it and it is the version that makes him the one who was left.

And what actually happened, in the August of 1969, outside a chip shop on Fenner Street, is that he asked me to stay and I said something else first.

I said: “Come with me, then.”

And he said he could not, because of his father.

And I said it again, twice, over about a fortnight.

And he said no, twice.

And then, on the third occasion, I said the thing about my own future that I will not write down, because it was cruel and because he remembered it, because Nancy quoted a piece of it back to me in the September, from 1969, fifty-six years later.

So I asked him first, and he refused me, and then I was cruel about it, and then I went.