My sixteen-year-old walked down a crowded beach to the ice cream stand and never came back. Eight years later, six hundred miles away, the wind lifted the hem of a stranger’s faded turquoise cover-up and I saw my mother’s crooked yellow sun stitched over the tear.
And the cover-up was the only thing she came out of that flat with, and she could not look at it, and she gave it to Ilse in 2018 and told her to throw it away.
Ilse has worn it every summer since. Six years. On the front, where anybody might walk past.
She has told me she is not sure whether she did that as a kindness or as a flare.
PART 5 — NINE MONTHS
It took nine months.
Not a reunion on a terrace. Ilse Warrender put her hand on my wrist and said that sentence because she knew exactly what would happen if a twenty-four-year-old was ambushed by her own mother outside a café, and she was right, and I have thanked her for it.
What happened instead was a letter, then a second letter, then a phone call in the February that lasted four minutes and which I could not speak through, then a third letter.
Then a Wednesday in the May, in a room at a family therapy service in Portmell, with a woman called Imogen Teal sitting between us.
We have had eleven of those.
Peder has met her twice. Her father and I separated in 2020, which is a thing I have not put in until now because it is not the interesting part of this and because there is nothing unusual about it; most of those marriages go.
