PART 4 — MAUD
Maud was eleven.
He woke her at about two in the morning on the night he left and he sat on the end of her bed and told her.
Not all of it. He told her that he had to go so that Oona could keep everybody together, and that she was not to tell me, ever, because if I knew I would go and find him and it would come undone.
And my daughter, who was eleven years old, kept that for thirty years.
She kept it through the hearing in 1998. She kept it through her own wedding in 2007. She kept it through nineteen years of Sunday lunches at a table with me at the end of it.
She has told me since that she nearly broke about four times, and that the worst was in 2011 when I had the operation and she sat in a hospital corridor and got as far as the first word.
There is a post office box in a town about eighty miles from here.
From 1999 until last year, twice a year, Maud Breen sent photographs to it.
School photographs, then graduations, then weddings, then grandchildren. Never a letter. He asked her not to write anything and she never did.
She has no idea whether he ever collected them. There was never a reply, not once, in twenty-six years.
He collected all of them. Hollis Teague has confirmed it. They were in a box in a rented flat in Wexford Row and there are two hundred and eleven of them and they are in order.
PART 5 — SUNDAY
Leland Brack died in the June. He was sixty-six. He lived alone and he worked in a builder’s yard until 2019 and there is nobody to speak to about him.
He never married. He never had another child.
He instructed Hollis Teague in 2016 and the only thing in the file is an instruction to deliver one envelope on the first Sunday after his death, to that address, in person.
I have been asked by four people now whether I forgive him and I have stopped answering, because the question has nothing in it that matches what happened.
He did not do anything to me. He did the arithmetic in a car park in 1995 and he got the right answer, and the cost of the right answer was thirty years of his own life and the belief of every person in this county that he was a man who walked out on ten children.
