The room went quiet.
Thirty-five people. His aunt four feet away. Sabine at the other end of that kitchen with a serving spoon.
Nobody said one word.
Not his mother. Not one of them.
And I said, “Sorry,” and put my bag on the floor, and somebody started talking about parking.
I never asked about it again.
PART 3 — IVOR
Ivor Pellier did not die in 1997.
There was an accident at that lake and he was in the water for a period of time, and he was resuscitated, and he came out of it with a hypoxic brain injury and an abdominal injury that he has a scar from.
He was four. So was Cassian.
He went into a residential facility in 1999 and he has been in various kinds of care and various kinds of nothing ever since, three counties away, and by 2011 Sabine Pellier had stopped going.
The family did not report him dead. Nobody committed an offence. They simply started saying it, at some point in the early 2000s, first as a way of not explaining and then as the truth, and by the time Cassian was fifteen it was the only version in that house.
He believed it until he was twenty-six.
He found out in 2019, the year before he married me, from a letter that came to his mother’s house about a placement review, which he opened because she had asked him to open her post while she was in hospital.
He confronted her. She told him it was handled and asked him to leave it.
And he did. For five years.
Then eight months ago Ivor turned up at our building.
He had come out of supported housing, he had nothing, and he had found his brother’s address in about four minutes the way anybody can.
Cassian did not tell me.
He put Ivor’s fingerprint on our door so that his brother could let himself in at two in the morning when he had nowhere, sleep on our sofa, shower, eat, and be gone by five.
Forty-seven times.
Eleven of those nights I was asleep eleven feet away.
