On the Sunday after we got back, both families came to my mother’s.
That lunch is the worst ninety minutes of my adult life and nothing happened at it.
Everybody was lovely. That is the point. My mother had done a leg of lamb and she was warm with Delphi in a way she has not been warm with Delphi since about 2021, and my uncle Dennis asked about the photographs, and somebody said the word brave twice.
Delphi sat through all of it with her hands round a glass.
Breda did not speak for about forty minutes, which if you know Breda is an event with sirens on it.
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And at one point my mother said, “Well — it’s one for the album, isn’t it,” and the table laughed, the warm laugh, the same one.
And I watched my wife’s face do absolutely nothing at all, and I still did not put it together.
I walked out to the cars afterward with Sunny because she was parked behind me.
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