Chapter 9

I decided I needed some advice. As the oven was still as unresponsive to my questions as ever, I turned to my gay sisters. Timothy was perhaps the most sensitive and the most in tune with my moods of any of my circle of friends. He’d had the pleasure of being with Robert, his partner for nearly thirty years. Unfortunately, Robert had a heart defect that no one knew about, and one evening when Robert climbed the stairs, he had a massive heart attack. The doctors told Timothy that Robert would have been dead before he hit the floor, and wouldn’t have known a thing. It took Timothy a long while to build up his life again, but he’d done it.

It came as little surprise that when Timothy took one look at me as I stood on his doorstep, he said, “Oh dear, you have got it bad.”

Over a pot of Earl Grey I told him the whole tale. Or rather the tale of the hole.