The Worst Thing I Have Ever Written, and I Have Written a Eulogy

She rang Dawn four times the next day.

Nine in the morning. Half eleven. Two. Half four.

The first three rang out. The fourth went to voicemail on the second ring, which meant it had been declined, which Hilary knew and which Dawn has since confirmed.

---

So she sent the message.

It was four hundred and sixty words long. She sent it at 1:14 in the afternoon, from a car park at work, having rewritten it twice on her phone after having written it on paper at two in the morning.

---

The problem with it was that it did two things at once.

It apologised for the message going to the wrong place. That part was fine, as far as it went, and if it had stopped there the next eleven years might have looked different.

And then it tried to explain what she had meant.

---

That is the part that finished it, and the reason is simple and quite hard to look at, which is that when Hilary tried to explain what she had meant, it turned out that she meant approximately what she had said.

She wrote that she had been tired. She wrote that it had been a hard few months at work.

And then she wrote that she thought maybe they had got into a bit of a rut, the four of them, and that maybe it would be nice to do something different sometimes rather than the same restaurant, and that she thought some of us had maybe been finding it a bit samey for a while.

Some of us.

She has said that if she could take one thing back out of the entire business, it would not be the original message. It would be those three words, which converted a private moment of unkindness into a claim that there was a faction.

---

Then she wrote — and this is the sentence Dawn quoted back to her, once, fourteen months later, having clearly kept it:

I honestly think if we’re all being honest the dinners have been more for you than for the rest of us for a while now.

---

Dawn replied at four in the afternoon.

One line.

I’d rather you’d just said it to me.

---

Hilary read that about two hundred times over the following fortnight, looking for the door in it.

There is no door in it. That is what she says now. It is a completely closed sentence, and it is also, she says, entirely correct, and there is no available reply to a sentence that is both of those things.

She tried three times anyway. Dawn did not respond to any of them.

---

Meanwhile the group chat did something that Hilary found almost more distressing, which was that it carried on.

Not normally. But it did not die either.

Nuala posted a link to something on the Saturday. Pav replied with a single emoji. Somebody mentioned a birthday. It had the shape of a conversation with all the weight taken out of it, and everybody in it was being extremely careful, and Dawn read everything and posted nothing.

“It was like being at a dinner party where somebody’s died,” Hilary says, “and everybody’s decided the kind thing is to keep passing the potatoes.”

---

Pav rang her on the Sunday.

Pav is the blunt one and always has been, and she did not waste any time.

“Right,” she said. “Two things. One, it was a horrible thing to write and you know it. Two, it wasn’t untrue and you know that as well, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise because there’s no point.”

“Pav—”

“I’ve been bored at those dinners for about four years,” said Pav. “So have you. Nuala hasn’t, because Nuala isn’t capable of being bored. The difference between me and you is that I never wrote it down.”

“So what do I do?”

And Pav said: “Nothing you do now is going to work. That’s not me being harsh. There’s a thing you don’t know.”

---

Hilary said, “What thing?”

“It’s not mine to tell you,” said Pav. “Ring Nuala.”