Nobody in that house asked anybody in that house for anything, for nine weeks, and all three of us were awake.
What happened that morning.
Armed response and two fire appliances were on scene inside about eleven minutes, which for Lark Hollow is very good and which is because of how I made that call, and that is the one thing I did on the seventh of October that I am not ashamed of.
He did not resist. He was sitting on the patio step with the can beside him and he had not opened it.
The crowbar had gone through the glass in the back door and nothing else. The gas was not touched. There was no fire and there was never any fire and he got no further than a door.
Chelo was arrested at the scene and released the same evening and was never charged.
I want that on the record because about four hundred people in Lark Hollow decided that week that his mother was in it with him, and she was not, and the bag in her hand had his passport in it.
And the five weeks, which I have had to describe properly to one person because I had been describing them as gathering evidence.
From the sixth of September I ran my own house like a job.
I photographed the policy schedule on the Saturday. I went through the second phone on two nights when he was asleep, and I know which nights because I logged them — I logged them, in a folder, with times, the way you log a job.
I went to the loft on the eighteenth and photographed the box with the paperwork from the business in it.
And I cooked his dinner. Every night of those five weeks, because that is my half of the week, and because stopping would have told him.
On the twenty-seventh of September — the day after the torch clip — we took Nia to a thing at a farm, the three of us, and there are photographs, and in two of them I am laughing.
I have looked at those photographs about forty times this year.
That is a woman who had watched four minutes of her husband at a gas supply in the dark nineteen hours earlier, at a farm, laughing, with a child between them.
I was good at it. That is the thing. Seven years of staying level on a line with somebody screaming on the other end, and it turns out that it works just as well at a kitchen table.
What happened afterwards.
He pleaded guilty in the June to arson with intent to endanger life and to a fraud charge. There was a trial on a third count which he was acquitted of and which I am not going to describe.
He got six years.
The house is sold. It was in negative equity by about sixty thousand because of a business of his that went in the October of 2024 and that I had signed things for in 2021, which is the second folder in this account and not one I am going to open here.
Nia and I are in a flat in Moraine City. It is small and it is ours and she has her own room and she chose the colour.
And Fen, who I shared my location with and who I had told nothing for five weeks.
She was on the desk that morning. Not on my call — it came through to Lorrie — but she was four feet away and she saw the address come up on the board.
And she has said one thing to me about all of it, in the February, in a car park at work, and she said it without any heat at all.
She said: “You sent me a map pin.”
Five weeks of a folder, and the one thing I gave the person I sit next to for forty hours a week was a blue dot moving along the Moraine road at twenty past seven in the morning.
No message. No context. A location share, which is a thing you send a friend when you are walking home.
And she said: “If it had gone wrong, I’d have spent the rest of my life working out what that pin was for.”
I had not thought about that once. Not in the car, not in the car park, not for four months.
I had used her as a backup drive.
She has not held it against me and we still work the same shifts and she asks after Nia every single week, and I have never once been able to say sorry properly, because the only honest version is: I did not think of you as a person that morning. I thought of you as a copy.