And Dinah said something to me at that kitchen table that I have carried for four years.
She said: “He’s a good lad, Pia. Don’t let people fill your head.”
Don’t let people fill your head.
And in the April of 2025, when Shauna rang me, the first thing I thought — and I know this because I remember thinking it, and it frightens me now — was not about my marriage.
It was: this time she’s going to see it.
That came before anything else. Before the girls. Before Corey. Before any of it.
And the eleven weeks, which I have described as being perfectly normal with a man on a ship.
And in the April I made myself go back through the actual messages, because Nuala asked me what normal had consisted of.
There are about four hundred of them between the twenty-third of April and the eleventh of July.
And they are not normal. They are better than normal.
