My parents dropped me at my grandfather’s when I was five and came back seventeen years later with a moving truck, the morning after his funeral. There was a stranger already sitting at his desk.

My mother did not speak to me again that day.

Not one word, for three hours, in a drive, eleven feet from me.

She has written twice since. Both letters are about what the recording might be used for and neither contains an apology, and I have read both and answered neither.

Linnea messaged me in the February.

Four lines. The first one is an apology and it is a real one, and I have read it enough times to be sure of that.

The last one is a question about the house.

I have decided that is simply who she is at twenty-six, and that it may not be who she is at thirty-six, and that I can wait ten years to find out because I have a house and she does not.

My father rang in the April.

Eleven minutes, about nothing at all. He asked whether the boiler was still playing up, which means he remembers that boiler, which means he lived in that house once as a boy.

He has rung four times since. Always about the house. Never about his father, and never about 1963, and I have not raised either.

I have not forgiven him.

He has not asked me to, which I give him some credit for, because the asking would have been for his benefit and he appears to know that.

We talk about the boiler. Eleven minutes at a time, four times a year.

That may be the whole of it for the rest of our lives and I have decided that is an acceptable outcome.

That is where we are and I am not going to pretend it is more.

I live in that house.

I am rebuilding the porch badly. The neighbours are being extremely polite about it and one of them keeps appearing with the right tool at the right moment and then leaving.

I have his shed. I am not good in it yet. I have made two things and both of them are wrong in the same way, which apparently is how it starts.

The quilt is on my bed.