It is not dramatic and there was nothing wrong in that marriage. It is about his mother, and a standing arrangement about Sundays that started in 1987 and never once got reviewed, and about what I did with roughly two thousand Sundays.
I had the sentence. I knew the sentence. I got close to it perhaps four times between 1990 and 2009 and I never said it, and then she died, and then he died, and the sentence has nowhere to go now.
And on the seventh of October, 2025, I said a version of it to a man in a half-zip who I will never see again, in a pressurised tube, where it cost me nothing.
That is why that story has done forty retellings.
Not because a woman stood up to a stranger. Because a woman who had never said the thing to the person it belonged to finally got to say it to somebody disposable, and found out she could do it, thirty-eight years late.
