My sister rang at eight minutes past midnight and told me to kill the lights, get into the attic, and not tell my husband. Through a gap in the floorboards I watched him hand a stranger three passports.
PART 5 — THE DRAWER
Devlin is not in prison. He is not living with us either.
He is somewhere with a name I did not choose, and Ollie sees him, under an arrangement that involves four adults and a lot of driving, and I am not going to explain any more of it than that.
We are not divorced. We are not anything. There is no word for what we are and I have stopped looking for one.
He lied to me for six years about what he did and then for fourteen months about what he had become, and the second lie is the one I have found harder, because the second lie was supposedly for me.
And on the night it ended he was going to put me in a car and tell me my own new name on a motorway.
Ven and I talk every day now.
She has said sorry to me exactly once, in a kitchen, in the February, and I told her not to say it again because she had not done anything, and she said, “I let Mum say that at a children’s party and I sat there.”
Our mother knows now. Most of it. She rang Ven in the spring and it did not go well and they are working on it, which at sixty-six and thirty-nine takes a while.
She’s got a job. She hasn’t got a family.
My mother said that in my hall in front of twenty-five people, holding a photograph of her own two daughters on a wall in 1996, face down on a table with her hand on it.
My sister put her coat on and said something about traffic.
She was, at that moment, eleven months into carrying the fact that my husband was under investigation, alone, without telling one person who loved her, because telling any of us would have made it more dangerous for me.
And for two years I decided she had gone cold about my marriage, and I never once picked up the phone and asked her a direct question.
The photograph is still in that kitchen drawer.
