I remember the quality of my mum’s voice that day.
I sat at the kitchen table as she was knelt opposite me, eyes raised to meet mine. This felt important. Her voice was careful, like it was carrying something fragile and she was testing the strength of each word as she spoke it, making sure it didn’t shatter. And then she said it.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Harry. He just doesn’t… like you.”
I was about 10. She wasn’t being cruel. She said it out of kindness, as a mitigation for the ordinary cruelties she’d watched with her own eyes, and I have never once blamed her for it.
I had picked up his hobbies, one after another, and often became better at them than he was. Cycling. Languages. The building and fixing. That was the thing he couldn’t forgive, though neither of us had the words for it then. He was warm with my older sister and not with me, and my mother had watched all of it.
