She was partly right and it has taken a year and a great deal of help to work out which part.
She was right that I should not be anything to that girl.
She was wrong about the word borrow, and she has since apologised for it, in a car park, badly, which is the only way anybody apologises for anything.
Etta was moved out of my class in the February. That was the correct decision, it was taken by the school with a safeguarding lead in the room, and I agreed with it in the meeting and I still agree with it.
I have not taught her since and I am not going to.
Here is what actually happened afterwards and it is not satisfying.
Gethin moved out in the April. The divorce went through in the spring of the following year and it was not contested and there was nothing to fight over.
He wrote to me four times. The first one is nine pages and the fourth one is half a page, and the half-page one is the only one I have kept.
It says: I told myself every day that I would say it once she was better.
I believe that too. That is the awful thing about my husband and it is why sixteen years of it were possible.
He is not a man who decided to lie for twelve days. He is a man who postponed something twelve times, each time for about two hours, each time with a reason he could have said out loud.
Rhoswen and I have met three times.
We are not friends and we are never going to be, and both of us have been extremely clear about that, which oddly makes it easier.
What she wanted from the third meeting was for me to tell her whether he had ever said he would leave.
I said no. He never did, not once, in twenty-two years.
She sat with that for a while and then she said: right. Well. That’s something.
I did not ask her what she meant and I have decided I do not need to.
Etta is eighteen now.
She sat her exams in a different room from the one I invigilate. She did better than anybody expected and she has gone to do something with history four hours away.
I have seen her twice since the February.
Once at a distance in a supermarket, where she looked at me and I did the only correct thing available, which was to nod once and keep walking.
And once in the June of last year, deliberately, in a café, with the safeguarding lead’s knowledge and with her mother’s agreement, for forty minutes, at Etta’s request.
I am not going to write what she said. It is hers.
I will write one thing, because she said it at the door on the way out, standing up, with her coat on.
She said: I’m sorry I look like her.
Eighteen years old.
