I drove that night. I did not shout and I did not cry in that house. I got Rex, I got in the RV, and I drove until about two in the morning and then I pulled into a rest stop near Winslow and sat in the dark.
I was two hundred and ten miles away by the Saturday.
And on the Monday I turned round.
Here is why, and it is not forgiveness, and I want to be precise about this because people get it wrong when they retell it.
It was not that I forgave him for the two seconds. I had already read the report in 2016. I knew what the physics were.
It was that in three weeks, that man had asked me more questions about my husband than my own children had asked me in ten years.
He knew everything about Daniel before I told him anything — the name, the car, the date, the road. And he sat there for three weeks and let me tell him all of it from the beginning, and asked me what Daniel was like, which is the question nobody asks a widow after about month four.
He was not getting something from me. He was giving me the one thing nobody else would, which was a person who wanted to hear about him.
That is also the thing I cannot entirely forgive, and both of those are true at the same time, and I have stopped trying to resolve it.
I did not marry Robert. We are not together in the way people want us to be when they hear this.
I park on his land for about four months of the year, between the travelling. He has three acres and a hook-up he put in himself, badly, and I pay him rent that he did not want and now accepts.
Hannah and I are, to my own surprise, close. She is the only person in this story who tried to do the right thing out loud, and she did it knowing it would cost her father something.
In the February, Robert and I drove out to the place on that road. He had never been back. Ten years, forty minutes from his house, and he had driven around it every single time.
We stood there for about twenty minutes and neither of us said very much.
On the way back he said: “I was going to tell you on the first day. Then I wanted one more day of you not knowing.”
Twenty-one more days, as it turned out.
People split on this and they split straight down the middle.
Half say he is a man who sat down opposite a widow under false pretences and let her grieve at him for three weeks.
The other half say he is the only person who ever carried any of it with me.
I am sixty-nine now. I have been through thirty-one states.
The route is the one Daniel wrote out in a notebook in 2016 and I have done all of it except the last two hundred miles.
I am not ready for those and Robert has never once asked me when I will be.
