My fiancé vanished a week before our wedding and left me his ten children. Thirty years later a man I had never seen knocked on my door in the middle of Sunday lunch.

Me.

But not married to him. That was the part that finished him.

Because the moment I married Leland Brack, his file became my file, and an assessment of that household would have been an assessment of him with me attached to it.

Whereas a woman of twenty-seven with no record, living in that house, known to all ten, applying on her own account, was a completely different application.

So he wrote six words and left, and he wrote them exactly the way he did — I can’t do this anymore — because he needed me to believe he was a coward.

The letter says: If you had known, you would have fought it. And we would have lost, and you would have lost them too.

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.