I got a B.
And at some point in about the March my mother told me he had been reading the textbook on his own in the evenings after I went up, and getting nowhere with it, and doing it anyway.
She told me that one too.
How I found out.
I am thirty and I bought a house in the spring.
And there is a point in that process where somebody asks you for documents you have not thought about since you were a teenager, and I rang my mother and asked whether she still had my old paperwork.
She has a folder. She has had it since about 2011 and it is held together with an elastic band.
And she gave me the whole thing and I went through it at my kitchen table on a Sunday.
And about two thirds of the way down there are two insurance certificates.
October 2013 and October 2014.
Policyholder: my name.
Payer: Hollis Brandt.
And I sat there and looked at them for a while, and then I rang my mother, and she told me the rest of it in about four minutes without pausing, because she has clearly been waiting thirteen years to be asked.
The account. The Saturdays. The builders’ merchant.
And she said — and this is the sentence that took the legs out from under me —
“He asked me not to tell you. Same as with the account.”
Same as with the account.
