The family did not report him dead. Nobody committed an offence. They simply started saying it, at some point in the early 2000s, first as a way of not explaining and then as the truth, and by the time Cassian was fifteen it was the only version in that house.
He believed it until he was twenty-six.
He found out in 2019, the year before he married me, from a letter that came to his mother’s house about a placement review, which he opened because she had asked him to open her post while she was in hospital.
He confronted her. She told him it was handled and asked him to leave it.
And he did. For five years.
Then eight months ago Ivor turned up at our building.
He had come out of supported housing, he had nothing, and he had found his brother’s address in about four minutes the way anybody can.
Cassian did not tell me.
He put Ivor’s fingerprint on our door so that his brother could let himself in at two in the morning when he had nowhere, sleep on our sofa, shower, eat, and be gone by five.
Forty-seven times.
Eleven of those nights I was asleep eleven feet away.
PART 4 — THE NIGHT
Cassian told me all of it on the Thursday,s, at our kitchen table, after Detective Ondrea Vasseur had sat in our front room for two hours and after he had stopped being a man who could hold a position.
He had given me the tablet that night on purpose. That is the worst thing he has ever done to me and he said so before I did.
Not to harm me. Because Ivor was coming, and because he had been managing the two of us in one apartment for eight months, and because he had run out of ways to do it.
At about ten that night the two of them had it out in our kitchen while I was asleep.
Cassian told him it was finishing. That there was a place with a bed available from the Monday, that he had already filled in the forms, and that he was telling me in the morning whatever it cost him.
Ivor took the truck at twenty-two past ten.
And he took the wallet off the counter, and the watch off the dish by the door, and the phone, and he took Cassian’s wedding ring off the shelf above the sink where my husband puts it every night because of the machines at work.
