Tell Me Who Is Not Speaking. I Do Not Need to Know Why.

It took about a year and a half to come right, and not all of it did.

Her mother apologised properly in the end.

It took three attempts. The first two were the kind that contain the word but, and Erin let both of them go past without comment, which she thinks was the right call and which was extremely difficult.

The third came in a garden centre café in the February, without any preamble at all, over a scone. Her mother said: “I should have rung you in August. I didn’t because I didn’t want the conversation, and I told myself it was for you. I’ve thought about it a lot.”

Erin said, “Thank you.”

And her mother said, “Right,” and then talked about a clematis for twenty minutes, and both of them were grateful for the clematis.

Her father has still never mentioned it.

Not once, in any form, including at the point where everybody else had thoroughly mentioned it. Erin has decided that this is simply what her father is, in the way that a chair is a chair, and that being disappointed about it annually is a poor use of her time.

She loves him. He is not going to change at seventy-three. Both of those are just true.

Faye and Erin are fine, which surprised both of them.

They had one enormous conversation in a car park outside a garden centre — a different garden centre; Erin has noticed that her entire family conducts its serious business in garden centres — which lasted an hour and ten minutes and in which both of them cried at different points and neither at the same time.

What came out of it was that most of the anger belonged somewhere else. Faye had spent the wedding standing up with her coat on and had spent the six months before it being unable to breathe properly, and had not once been angry with Erin, and had been terrified that Erin would be angry with her.

They are closer now than they were, which Erin finds slightly indecent and is not going to examine.

Gerry paid back four thousand of it and then stopped.

There was no announcement. It just stopped, and after about eight months Sean stopped expecting it, and after about a year Faye stopped mentioning it.

He was not at Erin’s fortieth. He was not not-invited, exactly. The list was done by a friend, and Erin looked at it, and did not add him, and that was the whole process and it took about four seconds.

Lorraine came, on her own, and was lovely, and left early.

The seating plan is in a box in the spare room with the order of service and the dried flowers and a napkin somebody signed.

Daniel thinks keeping it is odd. He has said so twice, once affectionately and once while looking for a drill.

Erin has explained it exactly once.

It is not a souvenir of the wedding. She has plenty of those, including four hundred photographs and a video she has watched twice.

It is a reminder of a specific thing she now says out loud, roughly twice a year, to whoever is organising whatever it is — a christening, a funeral, a fiftieth, a Christmas with too many people in the house:

Tell me who is not speaking. I do not need to know why. I just need to know before I do the tables.

She said it most recently to her cousin’s daughter, who is getting married in the spring and who had come round to look at the venue on a laptop.

The girl laughed and said, “God, is that a real thing people have to ask?”

“Ask it anyway,” said Erin.

And the girl, to her enormous credit, got a pen.