PART 1 — FIFTEEN MINUTES
The case was by the front door. I had my jacket over one arm and I was going over a presentation in my head that I was supposed to give in Verrin City at two.
Then Mina came down the hall barefoot.
She did not say anything at first. She came straight at me and put both arms round my middle and put her face into my shirt.
“Daddy, don’t go today.”
I said the thing you say. Two nights, sweetheart, I’ll be back Thursday.
She shook her head against my shirt. And then she turned her head sideways and looked down the hall at the kitchen.
That is the detail that stopped everything. Not the words. The look.
“When you go away, Cora puts something in my juice.”
I went cold from the scalp down.
“What?”
“She says it’s vitamins. But after, I don’t feel like me. And then she starts recording.”
I went down onto one knee so I was level with her.
“Recording you for what, Mina?”
She put her lips together the way she does.
“She says she has to show you how I am when you’re not here.”
I did not look toward that kitchen and it took everything I have ever had.
“Has she said anything else?”
Mina looked down the hall again.
“That one day you’ll understand I need to live somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. She says if I tell you about the juice you’ll believe the videos and think I’m making it up.”
And then, because she is six and because six-year-olds do not order information by importance, she said:
“She talks to Julian too.”
I had never heard that name in my life.
“Who’s Julian?”
“A man who comes when you’re away. They talk about Mummy’s beach house.”
Cora was in the kitchen doorway.
She had been there for some part of that, and I do not know how much, and I have never found out.
She was smiling at us, and she had a glass in her hand.
I said, “She doesn’t want me to go,” in a completely normal voice, and I stood up, and I picked up my case.
I kissed my daughter. I kissed my wife.
I got in the taxi at four minutes past seven and I went to the end of Wrenfold Lane and I told the driver to pull over.
Then I cancelled the flight, rang my sister-in-law, and sat in a car park eleven minutes away until eight o’clock.
At eight I walked back into my own house through the side door.
PART 2 — THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY
Tamsin died four years ago, in the February, eleven weeks after a diagnosis.
Mina was two. She does not remember her and she has about nine things she says about her that she has assembled out of photographs and out of what her grandmother tells her, and she says them like facts, and I have never corrected one of them.
For three years it was me and her. Work, the school run, plain dinners, a bath, two books, and questions at half past seven at night that no six-year-old should have to ask.
Cora came into that in the spring of last year. We married ten months before that Tuesday morning, which everybody told me was fast and which I did not want to hear.
And she was, for a long time, extraordinary.
She never once asked me to take a photograph down. She never got that look when Mina talked about her mother. She came with Mina and Rosalind every February to put flowers out at Sable Point, and she stood back and let them do it.
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