PART 5 — SUNDAY
Leland Brack died in the June. He was sixty-six. He lived alone and he worked in a builder’s yard until 2019 and there is nobody to speak to about him.
He never married. He never had another child.
He instructed Hollis Teague in 2016 and the only thing in the file is an instruction to deliver one envelope on the first Sunday after his death, to that address, in person.
I have been asked by four people now whether I forgive him and I have stopped answering, because the question has nothing in it that matches what happened.
He did not do anything to me. He did the arithmetic in a car park in 1995 and he got the right answer, and the cost of the right answer was thirty years of his own life and the belief of every person in this county that he was a man who walked out on ten children.
He never corrected one of them.
I would not have let him take that on his own and he knew it, and that is precisely why he did not ask me.
Tilly is thirty-two and she has no memory of him at all. She has read the letter twice and she has said she does not know what to do with it, and I have told her that is a perfectly good place to be.
