Part Nine: Warm Tea and a Gold Wrapper

There was no end to the looking after.

He was forever arriving with hot tea, or with the caramel-filled bar of chocolate I liked, and the entire running of the house simply moved across onto him without either of us discussing it.

The tea was a campaign.

He developed a theory that I was not drinking enough and he began putting a mug down beside me roughly every ninety minutes, and when I pointed out that I could not actually consume tea at that rate he said that the point was availability.

The chocolate is the thing I cannot talk about even now without having to stop.