PART 1 — THE BAG
I had it packed.
That is the detail I keep going back to. A holdall, by the front door, since the Thursday night, because I had been told we were all going and because nobody had corrected me.
Wilder came out at about half nine on the Saturday and kissed my forehead the way you pat a dog.
“Don’t be dramatic, Viv. It’s a week.”
And his mother came through the hall with her case, saw the bag on the floor beside me, and picked it up.
She put it back down inside the hall and shut it in with her foot.
“Give me that, you’re not coming. And do the guest rooms while we’re gone — I want it spotless.”
His sister Saskia, going past with a tote: “Maybe the baby can help.”
All three of them laughed. Properly laughed, in a drive, with a woman eight months gone standing on the gravel in slippers.
My ankles were the size of grapefruit. I had been up at four with heartburn.
I had cooked for those people every Sunday for three years, paid for two of their holidays, and apologised to them at Christmas for something I had not done.
The SUV went round the corner at about twenty to ten.
And I stopped crying, which surprised me, because I had been at it since about eight.
I went in past my own bag and picked up the phone and rang the one person that family had spent three years pretending did not exist.
“Ambrose. It’s Vivienne.”
Half a second of nothing.
“Is it all of it?”
“All of it.”
That house has never belonged to the Dunmores. I inherited it through my grandmother’s trust in 2021, before I married Wilder, and he has always known that, and his mother has called it our family home at her own table about four hundred times.
By six that evening every external lock had been changed.
On the Monday Ambrose Teale filed notice ending Wilder’s permission to live there, under a clause in a postnuptial agreement that man signed in the May of 2021 and never read properly.
And on the Tuesday I froze the company account.
Wilder has spent three years telling people I help out with his contracting firm.
I own sixty-eight percent of it.
They got back on the Saturday. There was a man standing in my doorway who none of them had ever seen before, and what he said to them was:
“You can’t come in. This isn’t your family’s house.”
PART 2 — THE TABLET
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