PART 1 — THE BOX
Everybody thought they knew why I married Rowland Fisk, and they were not entirely wrong.
I was thirty-two and I owed forty-one thousand dollars and I was eleven days from losing a flat I could not afford in the first place.
He was sixty-two. Widowed, comfortable, a house on Wexley Hill, watches, more money than a man of sixty-two can get through.
And completely on his own.
We met at a charity thing where I was carrying a tray of champagne.
He asked me my name.
Then he looked down at my shoes and asked whether my feet hurt.
That is all it was. Nobody had asked me anything like that in about four years and I had to go and stand in a corridor for a minute.
He asked me to marry him three months later.
My friends thought I had lost my mind. His children were certain I was after the money, and I am not going to pretend they had no grounds.
His daughter Pru said it to my face at the reception.
And Rowland heard her say it, and he did not argue with her.
He just smiled and said, “She’ll get exactly what she deserves.”
I pretended none of it landed.
And yes — I loved the money. I loved waking up warm. I loved putting things in a trolley without doing sums. I loved four years of that particular fear just stopping.
What I did not expect was him.
He was patient and funny in a dry way and he was the kindest person I have ever been in a room with, and somewhere in the second year it stopped being a thing I had done to survive.
I started ringing him at lunchtime for no reason.
Then in the February he got ill and it was six weeks from the scan to the funeral.
His children barely looked at me in that church. Alder did not speak to me at all and Pru looked at me the way you look at somebody who has taken something.
I cried anyway, and I have stopped apologising for that.
Four days after, Bertram Quill, who was his solicitor for thirty-one years, asked me to come into the office.
Both of them were already sitting there when I arrived.
I was expecting a will. Folders. Whatever it is.
There was a small wooden box in the middle of that desk. About the size of a shoebox, older than me, with a brass catch.
Quill said, “Rowland left very specific instructions.”
Pru made a small noise, a sort of laugh.
And Bertram Quill pushed that box across the desk to me and said:
“He made sure you got exactly what you deserved.”
PART 2 — THE WAITRESS
The reception was about twenty-five people in the back room of a hotel, which was as much as either of us wanted.
I had a card. Four lines, in my handwriting, because I was going to say something short about him and I knew I would not get through it without something in my hand.
I stood up.
And Pru came round the table and took it out of my fingers.
She did not snatch it. She took it, read the first line, folded it in half and put it under the edge of her own plate.
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