PART 5 — SHE HAS NOT SPOKEN TO ME SINCE
Norma Delaine instructed a solicitor in the January.
She did it herself. I did not suggest it and I did not help and I was not a party to any of it.
There was a repayment order in the summer. Ardan is paying her back at four hundred and eleven dollars a month and will be until he is fifty-one.
She has not spoken to me since that Sunday.
Not one word in fourteen months. No card, no call, nothing.
I have had two years to understand it and I think I do. I am the person who put a folder on her kitchen table and made her see what her son had done to her.
People do not forgive that, and the reason is not that they think you are wrong.
Halla deleted the video. She rang me in the February to say so, which I did not ask her to do, and she also said something that I have kept, which is that she had heard the forty-one thousand mentioned at a Christmas in 2019 and had never once asked anybody about it.
Ardan and I divorced in the spring. He did not contest anything because there was nothing to contest.
The house is mine. It always was. There is no claim against it and there never could have been, and I have a letter from a solicitor that says so which cost me nine hundred dollars and which I have never needed.
My son bought this house and I helped him do it. You've landed on your feet, Rowan.
She said that in my own garden, holding a bottle she had just taken out of my hand, in front of thirty people, four months after my wedding.
Every single one of them put their glasses up.
She believed it. That is the part that took me longest and it is the part I would want anybody to take away.
That sentence was not spite. It was a lie a man told his mother in 2018 to keep her from asking where her money had gone, and it came out of her mouth in a garden in 2019 as a toast.
And I stood there with an empty hand and let thirty people drink to it, because correcting her would have made me look like the woman she thought I was.
