Four people wanted the whole thing as a story, and one of them asked me at a leaving do, in front of six people, whether it had been “legally a real marriage,” and I said yes and then went and stood in a stairwell for a bit.

And two people were unkind.

One of them said, not to my face and reported to me by somebody who thought I would want to know, that it was a strange thing for a woman of thirty-two to do and that she would like to know what was in it for one of us.

I minded that for about six months and I do not mind it now, and the reason I do not is not strength of character.

It is that by the time I heard it I had already spent four months asking myself a much harder version of the same question, with documents, on a stair.