It Was Meant for Her Sister. It Went to the Group.

The group was called The Coven, which they had thought was hilarious in 2004 and which none of them had ever changed.

Four of them. Hilary, Dawn, Pav and Nuala. Thirty-one years, since a shared house in their second year, through nine house moves, three divorces, seven children, two redundancies and one funeral.

They had dinner roughly every six weeks. Dawn booked it. Dawn had always booked it.

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The message was meant for Hilary’s sister.

That is true, and it was true immediately, and Hilary said so within ninety seconds, and all of that is completely irrelevant to what happened next, as Hilary herself would now tell you.

She had two chats open. She had been talking to her sister about the weekend, and her sister had asked whether she was going to the thing on the Saturday, and Hilary had typed a reply and sent it into the wrong window.

It said — and there is no point being coy about it, because everybody involved has read it several hundred times:

God, another dinner. It’s always another dinner with her. 11 yrs of the same restaurant and the same 4 stories and I genuinely cannot face it. Can we say we’ve got Mum?

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It went at 9:41 on a Thursday night.

Hilary saw what she had done at 9:41 and forty seconds, because the group photo was at the top instead of her sister’s face.

She has described what happened in her chest at that moment as “like going through the floor”.

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She did not delete it.

This is the first of the two decisions that matter, and she made it in about four seconds, and she has gone round and round on it ever since.

She could have. It was well inside the window. One press and a bit of grey text saying a message was deleted.

She did not, because — and this is her account, given in a car park fourteen months later and not varied since — she thought that deleting it would be worse. That they would all have seen the notification on their lock screens anyway. That a deleted message would look like a cover-up, and that whatever it said would then be worse in their heads than it was on the page.

She is still not sure she was wrong about that. She is very sure about what she did next, which was nothing.

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There were eleven minutes before anyone responded.

Hilary has described those eleven minutes as the longest of her adult life. She did not type. She did not put the phone down. She sat on a kitchen stool and watched the screen and watched the little grey read markers come up one at a time.

Nuala at 9:43.

Pav at 9:44.

Dawn at 9:48.

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Then Pav wrote: Hils.

Just that. One word and a full stop, from a woman who has never in thirty years ended a message with a full stop.

Then Nuala wrote: oh Hilary.

And Dawn, who had read it at 9:48, wrote nothing at all.

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Hilary wrote at 9:53. She has the whole thing and has been unable to delete it.

That was meant for my sister. I’m so sorry. That was a horrible thing to say and I didn’t mean it.

Nobody replied to that either.

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At about 10:20 Nuala rang her, and they talked for forty minutes, and Nuala was — Hilary has always said this — completely fair. She did not pretend it was nothing. She also did not pile in.

“Is it true?” Nuala said, at about minute thirty.

And Hilary, who had had forty minutes to prepare an answer, said: “A bit of it.”

“Which bit?”

“The restaurant,” said Hilary.

There was a pause.

“Right,” said Nuala. “That’s not the bit that’ll have hurt her.”

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Hilary did not sleep.

At about two in the morning she got up and wrote out, on paper, the things she wanted to say to Dawn, because she had decided she would ring first thing.

At six she read it back and thought it was good.

It was not good. It was the worst thing she has ever written, and she has written a eulogy.