did not say anything else for the rest of the walk home.
And he knew from the way his mother went very slightly still at the name.
He told me all of that in a hospital corridor while his father slept, standing up, holding two cups of tea, and at the end of it he said something I have thought about a great deal since.
“I want to say this once and then I’ll leave it. I’ve had forty years of him and you’ve had four days. So I’m not going to pretend it’s fair. But I’ve never once had all of him either, and I’m forty next month, and I worked out what that was about when I was about nineteen.”
And then he said: “I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming the bit where nobody told anybody anything.”
The letter.
Adele left a letter.
Not with Gil. With her
