So I sat on a red flag for eleven months to protect a secret I was keeping for my own reasons.
And here is the part that I have had to say out loud to a woman called Halla on Mondays, which took until about the June.
The secret was not modesty.
I have told that story for twenty years. My grandfather told me at nineteen never to let anybody know what I owned, because the day they know is the last day anybody tells you the truth, and I took it as gospel and built a life on it.
But I did not keep it from Dash for twenty years. I kept it from him for six, inside a marriage, after a wedding.
And what it gave me was not privacy.
It was a permanent test that he did not know he was sitting.
Every single time that man was rude to a waiter, every time he said something about my accent, every time he mentioned my “little inheritance” in front of his friends — I logged it. Quietly. For six years. With the answer sheet in my handbag.
