That she knew — she knew — the secret was doing damage. That in July she’d nearly told me. That Cressida had told her in August to just tell him, Ren, this is going wrong, and she’d said, it’s eight weeks.
And she learned things about me. That I’d been counting the dinners since March. That I’d noticed the showers in April. That I had said nothing for six months because I was more afraid of the answer than of the not-knowing, which is its own kind of cowardice, and I own it.
At about two she said, “Would you really have filed?”
“I had a folder,” I said. “Abel printed it.”
“You changed the locks.”
“Yes.”
“You packed my clothes.”
“Yes.”
“You sent my mother a photograph.”
“Yes.”
She nodded slowly, over and over.
“That’s who you are when you’re sure of something,” she said. “That’s useful to know.”
And I said, “That’s fair.”
The damage took months, not days.
Her mother did not speak to me until Christmas. Her stepfather still hasn’t, properly. I sent an apology to that family thread on the Saturday morning that was four paragraphs long, and it did about as much as four paragraphs can do.
Nova, the youngest sister, told me at a birthday in November that she’d defended me the whole afternoon, right up until she found out I’d changed the locks before I’d asked a single question.
That one lands somewhere permanent, I find.
Renata and I started seeing a counselor in Halden Cross in November. Twice a month, then once. We’re still going.
The first useful thing that woman said to us, in about the third session, was that we had both been running the same play from opposite ends: she’d built a nine-month surprise so she wouldn’t have to have a hard conversation, and I’d built a nineteen-hour case so I wouldn’t have to ask a hard question.
Neither of us liked hearing it. Which is generally the sign.
We did go down to the yard, in the end.
Not that Sunday. That Sunday we barely spoke, and we ate dinner in a restaurant where neither of us finished anything, ten years to the day.
We went the Sunday after.
It was a bright cold morning and the tide was out and Gullet Row smelled like it always smelled — diesel and weed and salt.
She parked and gave me the keys and didn’t come in.
“It’s yours,” she said. “Go on.”
The sign was up over the door. Cleaned, re-lacquered, straight. THORNE & SON — MARINE JOINERY, which is my mother’s family name and my father’s stubbornness, and which he painted on the first shed in 1986.
Inside, the floor was four coats deep and the light came off it like water.
His bench was against the far wall. The vice was cleaned and oiled and it turned smoothly. On the shelf above it, in a row, were his chisels — she’d found them in a bucket in the corner, taken them home in June, and had them ground and re-handled by a man in Ferrow Street who does nothing else.
I sat on the bench for about half an hour and I didn’t do anything at all.
Then I went out and sat on the slipway next to my wife, and I said the only thing I’d been able to come up with in a week.
“I called you and you said you were asleep, and you were. You were right there.” I nodded at the shed. “You were forty feet from my father’s bench, on a camp cot, keeping the temperature up so the floor wouldn’t bloom. And I stood in our bedroom and decided who you were.”
She didn’t say it’s okay. She’s never said it’s okay, and I respect her for that.
She said, “And I let you stand there.”
The watch went back to Desmond Kale on the Monday, by courier, insured.
I run the yard three days a week now. Small jobs — brightwork, repairs, a couple of restorations. It doesn’t make what my engineering job makes and it never will.
The eleven pages of bank statement are in a drawer in the office out there. I kept them. Renata thinks that’s strange and possibly unhealthy and she may be right.
But I take them out sometimes when I’m certain about something.
Because every line on those pages was true. The money was gone. The nights were real. The watch was on my table.
I had the evidence, all of it, every bit of it accurate.
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