He said to me, in a stairwell, sitting on a step, about ten minutes later: I’ve been waiting for somebody from your house to walk in here for the better part of a year.
He said he had rehearsed it. That he had a version of it ready in case it was me and a shorter version in case it was Soren’s mother.
Then he said: I was going to tell you in the spring. And then it got easier not to. And then it got harder.
And then he said the thing that made me put the lunch box down on a step.
He said: he asked me not to. In the April. He came in and he asked me not to tell anybody, in case it got back to you.
There is a second thing about that department that I found out later and that nobody at that hospital has said out loud.
Everybody knew.
Not about the warehouse. About the suspension.
Twenty people in that corridor, and a good half of them had known since the spring that Soren was not working there.
And for eleven months, not one of them rang me. Not one of them stopped me in a supermarket. Nobody’s wife sent a message.
That is not cruelty and I have stopped reading it as cruelty. It is the same thing every time.
Everybody assumed somebody closer had already done it.
The nurse whose christening I went to told me in the August that she had picked up her phone twice.
She said: and then I thought, well, she’ll know. She’s his wife.
