And then at the end, in a different pen, so I know he came back to it:
***You’d already gone though hadn’t you. Before Mum. I’m not stupid Saoirse. I just couldn’t work out how to say it first.***
I read that in a rented flat in Ellisport at eleven o’clock at night and I did not sleep.
Because he was right, and because he had known for months, and because the two of us had sat in a house for half a year, each waiting for the other one to be the one who ruined it.
And then his mother walked in and gave us both an exit, and I took mine at 1:14 in the morning with a solicitor cc’d, and he took his by shouting at me at a dinner table
in front of his family.
We were doing the same thing. Mine was tidier. That is the only difference I can find and I have looked.
What I have had to take.
The sale was lawful, correct, and entirely mine to make. I will not be told otherwise and Rosalind would not let me be.
But I need to write down what the shape of it was, because I sold the house from under them has been repeated to me approvingly by about nine people and every single time it has made me feel slightly ill.
I did not do it because they had disrespected me.
I did it because I had a start date in the September and a decision I had been sitting on since the eleventh of March, and because on that Thursday a man gave me a reason that everybody — my mother, my sister, the nine
people at work — would accept without asking me a single follow-up question.
That is the actual function of what happened at that dinner table.
It did not change my mind. It gave me a story.
And I have watched myself tell it. Twenty or thirty times in a year, and it gets tighter every time, and the pregnant woman gets smaller in it every time, and at some point in about the January I noticed that I had stopped mentioning that she was in it at all.
