The thing that was real was the lock log. It was the only thing that was real, and it was sitting in an app on my phone for eight months and I had never once opened it.
Whether Ivor Pellier meant to go off that road is not established and it is not going to be.
The finding was that the vehicle did not brake. There is no note, no message, and nothing in the four hours before it that anybody can read either way.
Detective Vasseur told me that in these cases the answer is usually that there is no answer, and that the family has to decide what to carry.
PART 5 — WHAT SABINE KNEW
The identification took nine days. It was dental in the end.
Ivor Pellier was thirty-two. He had a name and a date of birth and a placement history and a social worker who had been trying to reach him since the August.
She came to the funeral. There were eleven of us.
Sabine Pellier did not come.
She has said one thing to me about all of it, in the November, on her own doorstep, and it is the reason I have not been back.
She said, “I lost him in 1997.”
And I said that he had died in the February.
And she said, “No. In 1997.”
She has not been prosecuted and there is nothing to prosecute. It is not an offence to stop visiting. It is not an offence to let people believe something and never correct it.
Cassian and I are still married and it has been the worst year of my life and I am not going to write about most of it.
He lied to me for eight months about a living man in our apartment, and he put something in my drink, and he did both of those things while telling himself he was managing it, and he has never once tried to sell me a version where he was not.
What he says, and what I believe, is that he could not work out how to say the sentence.
