The Carrier by Sophie Hannah

and said, ‘No aspect of my behaviour has anything to do with Francine, now or ever. I ignore her as scrupulously as you ignore my free will.’ Seeing that I wanted to pursue it further, he forcefully changed the subject. Later, I puzzled over what he might have meant, and came to this conclusion: he didn’t have to marry you. He could have left you at any time. Or he could have stayed with you but stood up to you when you tried to micro-manage every facet of his life. When he finally walked out on you, he could have gone straight to Gaby Struthers and told her she was the woman he loved and wanted to be with. He needn’t have turned his back on his friends and his career, rented a hovel of a bedsit in Bath, logged on to the internet five months later in search of advice about how to slit his wrists in a way that would guarantee his death. At every stage he had choices – that was what he was trying to tell me. To an external observer, it looked as if he obeyed your orders slavishly until the day he left you, but Tim chose to define it differently. He liked to think he disregarded you entirely, and picked the course of action that was best for him every time. If that happened to be whatever would keep you happy and therefore off his back, then the benefit to you was a side effect. Kerry’s sure this is how he saw it, and I agree with her.
    Has he told you about trying to end his life, Francine? Maybe he has. He talks to you now in a way that he didn’t before, when you could answer. He didn’t tell me and Kerry when he rang us out of the blue, after no contact for five months, and said in his normal tone of voice, ‘I suppose you’re too busy to come round, aren’t you?’, as if we were still regularly in touch and nothing had changed. Kerry said we weren’t too busy. There was and is no such thing in our world as being too busy for Tim. You wouldn’t understand, Francine, but he’s our only family. All three of our actual families are worse than useless – quite a lot worse. We have no one but each other. I’ve come to the conclusion that people who suffer our particular type of deprivation tend to gravitate towards one another: those of us looking for water that can be thicker than blood is for most people, if you get my drift.
    Do you know the story of Tim and his family? Has he told you yet? Post-stroke, I can’t see why he wouldn’t.
    I knew it was Tim on the phone from the way Kerry sat upright and waved frantically at me, signalling emergency. We hadn’t heard from him since the letter he’d written us when he left you and Heron Close, informing us that we’d never see him again, consoling us with the assurance that we were better off without his third-rate presence in our lives.
    ‘Where are you?’ Kerry asked him. ‘Give us an address. We’re on our way.’ The address was in Bath, three and a half hours’ drive from Spilling. It was eleven thirty at night. We knew we would miss work the next day. Neither of us cared. Kerry suggested this might be the perfect opportunity to both hand in our notice. We were about to become very rich thanks to Tim, and Kerry was convinced that his unexpected phone call meant that we would need to abandon our regular lives for the foreseeable future and devote ourselves entirely to helping him. ‘He wouldn’t have rung if his situation wasn’t desperate,’ she said on the way to Bath. Having delegated the driving to me, she was taking care of the worrying.
    I tried to disagree. ‘He might just have missed us and fancied getting in touch,’ I suggested. ‘No,’ Kerry said. ‘Whether he fancied it or not, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to do it unless he’d reached a crisis point. And this is Tim we’re talking about. He’d need to recognise it as a crisis – think how bad it’d have to be for that to happen. If it wasn’t life or death . . .’ I heard her exhale, trying to breathe her anxiety out. ‘Tim isn’t an undoer. He makes the most