My husband said the storage unit was empty — he had been paying for it every month for fourteen years.
Wilf told me, on that row, that they mostly talk about her.
He said: “Nobody talks about her. Her mum can’t. Her brother’s in Perth. I get one morning a year where somebody says her name out loud for an hour and doesn’t change the subject.”
And then he said the thing that I have not been able to put down since May, and I wrote it in my phone in the car afterward because I did not want to lose a word of it:
“He’s the only one who was there. That sounds like a terrible reason and it’s the only one I’ve got.”
And then he asked me not to tell my husband that I knew.
Not for Reuben. For himself.
He said he thought Reuben would stop coming, and that he would rather have his one morning a year than be right about anything.
I said no.
That is the only decision in this entire business that I am completely sure about.
I said no, and I said it on that row, and Wilf Ostrom nodded and said “aye, fair enough” and did not argue with me for one second, and I think he had known the answer before he asked.
I rang Reuben from the car park at about twenty past twelve.
And I told him where I was.
And there was a silence of about eleven seconds, and then my husband said: “Is Wilf there?”
Not “you had no right.” Not “I can explain.”
Fifteen years of marriage and the first thing out of him was whether the other man was all right.
