Whatever you want to do, I’ll do.”

I did not sleep.

But I want to record that at four in the morning on the Wednesday, sitting in a chair in my own front room, I was thinking about how it might be done.

Not forgiven — done.

Separate houses for a year, some kind of arrangement, therapy, a long slow thing.

She was Nell’s mother.

I had loved her for a decade.

She had been twenty-six.