“I woke with a dreaded pain of hunger this morning, but it was not for food. You knew about hat. It was our most important secret, and because you knew, it kept me alive.”

“I was more anxious about leaving you than last time. Supposing you did not come back, and I would never be in your room again? Separation was an agony for me which, as soon as one holiday ended, started again in anticipation of the next.”

“Everyone fears catastrophes and disasters and crashes and deaths, and people who attack you in the dark. You made all that worse for me. I felt something might happen which would separate me from you, and I could not deal with life without you.”

“You telephoned me every evening. I was very grateful to you. Sometimes we would talk for five or ten minutes, and sometimes for three-quarters of an hour. I liked to be in bed before you rant at ten o’clock, and I always asked if everything was all right. Of course things were not, and never will be all right, but you were all right with me. That is what matters throughout the whole of the world. “You are all right with me.”

“I had often tried to get out of your room, having travelled all the way there. It frightened me to be caught in a trap which was becoming painful, and one from which I had no escape.”

“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off!”

“I pretended it was nothing. That day I told you about my baby, and why I had had an abortion. It would have damaged other lives. I had killed my own real baby ten years before, but it remains my living child, and will always be so. It is worse when there is no grave. I wanted you to recognize its existence. No one else does, and that is what I cannot bear.”