He said my name. Halle.
My mother came up behind him. And then her eyes went past me to Leo.
Nobody said anything. Ten years standing in a doorway in the amount of time it takes to breathe out.
And then I said: I need to tell you the truth.
My father’s face went tight.
I said: about Leo.
My mother’s hand went over her mouth.
And I said: and about why I couldn’t get rid of him.
PART 3
When I said I could not tell them, at nineteen, I was not protecting a man.
I was keeping a promise to their son.
My brother Rhys was twenty-two when he got his diagnosis.
He kept it from our parents for eight months. I was the only person on this earth who knew, and I only knew because I found a hospital letter in the door pocket of his car when I borrowed it in the February.
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He made me swear in a car park outside a garden centre.
I was eighteen. I swore because he asked me to, and because he was crying, and because I did not have the faintest idea what I was agreeing to.
The reason he would not tell them is the part that people find hardest, and it is not complicated at all when you have met my father.
Our father does not have bad news. He has problems, and problems have solutions, and a man who cannot produce a solution has not tried.
Rhys had watched him do it to a cousin in 2013 and to his own brother in 2016.
He said, in that car park: he’ll make it about what I should have done.
And he was right. I know
he was right, because eight years later, in a kitchen, my father said to me — about Rhys, about the diagnosis, about a boy who had been dead for eight years — he should have gone in sooner.
Before treatment started, he stored samples. Everybody in his position is offered it and most people say yes without thinking about it very hard.
