They buried her father on a Tuesday, in the rain, in front of two hundred and ten people, forty of whom had worked for him and nine of whom had helped take his company apart.
Amelia shook all their hands.
That was the thing about a funeral: it is a receiving line for the people who ruined you. She stood at the door of the church in her mother's black coat with her husband's hand at the small of her back and thanked Gordon Vale for coming, and thanked the man from the bank for coming, and thanked a person called Miles who had once, in a meeting in the spring, referred to her father's factory as the asset.
"You're doing brilliantly," Julian said, in the gap.
"I'm not doing anything."
"That's what I mean." He straightened her collar. He had beautiful hands and he used them like punctuation. "You're upright and you're civil and half of these people came to look at you. Twenty more minutes and then I'll get you out."
He got her out in eighteen.
That was Julian. He said twenty and he did eighteen, and he did it by putting himself between her and the last four handshakes with a warmth so complete that all four of them left feeling they had been given something. In the car he put her feet in his lap and took her shoes off and did not say anything at all for six miles, which was, of all the kindnesses of that day, the one she nearly cried at.
She had been married to him for eight months and nine days.
The envelope came at nine in the evening, by hand, from her father's solicitor, and Amelia was so tired that she nearly put it on the hall table with the other post.
It was thick. It had her name on it in Ray Fenwick's terrible handwriting: ADA — FROM YOUR FATHER'S OWN FILE. R.F. And underneath, in a different pen, obviously added later, obviously after some hesitation:
He asked me to give you this if you ever asked for it. You never asked. I've decided it was time.
She took it up to the small room at the top of the house, which was going to be an office and was in fact where the ironing board lived, and she sat on the floor with her back against the radiator and opened it.
It took her forty minutes to understand what she was looking at.
Not because it was complicated. Because it was simple, and because every time she got to the bottom of a page some part of her went back to the top and started again, on the assumption that a woman who had just buried her father was not reading properly.