Chapter 19 — WHAT DANIEL SAID AT THE END

I have seen my husband twice since December.

The second time was in a corridor outside a courtroom in June and we had about ninety seconds because our lawyers were both on the phone.

He looked well. He looks well. That is one of the things nobody tells you.

He said, "How is he?"

I said, "Which one?"

And that stopped him for a second, and then he said, "Thomas."

I said Thomas was in therapy twice a week and was doing all right and had started having Owen over again.

He nodded.

And then Daniel Ashcombe said the only completely honest thing I heard him say in nineteen years, and he did not know it was honest, and that is what makes it the sentence I have kept.

He said:

"Val, you have to understand — those houses were full. That's fifty-eight kids who had somewhere to sleep. What do you think happens to them now?"

He was not lying and he was not performing.

He genuinely believed that he had been the one keeping those beds full, and that filling a bed and caring for a child are the same act, and that anybody who broke the machine had cost fifty-eight children a place to sleep.

There is a real question inside that and it is the question Odalys refused to give me an answer to in a car park in November.

But he was not asking a question.

He was asking me to be grateful.

I said, "Fifty-one. There were fifty-one. Seven of the beds you were billing for were empty and you were billing anyway. Odalys found it in the third drawer."

Then our lawyers came back and we went into separate rooms.