My wife left me with our six daughters for a wealthy man. Fifteen years later she texted to say she’d be at our oldest daughter’s wedding — and my daughter told me to let her come, because she had already prepared a special welcome for her.

Sabina said — and I have never once had to look this up, it is simply in me the way my own phone number is:

“You can’t give me the life I want. Roland can. He bought me a car. He took me to the coast for a week. Do you understand what kind of life that is? That’s the life I’m supposed to have. You can’t give me anything.”

Roland Frayne was her manager at the property firm in Bristow Vale. It had been going on nine months, which is a number I only learned later and which I have chosen not to think about in relation to Tansy’s age.

Then she went out and shut the door.

That was it. No note afterward. No phone call. Not one card, in fifteen years, to any of the six of them.

And I stayed, because there was nothing else to do. That is not a virtue and I have gotten very tired of being told it is one. There were six girls in that house and one adult left in it and the math was not complicated.