My eighteen-year-old daughter vanished the day I got married and left a letter saying she never wanted to see me again. It was her handwriting. It took me eleven months to understand that they were not her sentences — and by then I knew exactly who had dictated them, and what he had asked her for three weeks before the wedding.
And my daughter said: you’d have wanted to.
Then she said the thing that I have not repeated to anybody until now, and that I think about at about four in the morning maybe once a fortnight.
She said: and then he’d have sat you down that night and been reasonable at you for an hour, and by Thursday you’d have been asking me to see somebody.
PART 3
Here is what my husband actually did, and it is not what anybody guesses, and I have had a year of people guessing at me.
Lazlo died with insurance and with a stake in a business that Marta bought out over the following four years.
