After the call I did not go to Patricia and describe this cost. I had already put up the sign. I was done with the version of the response that communicated through signals.
What I did instead was write it in the notes I was keeping at the time, the same notes from which I had built the walk conversation. The call interruption became item seven of nine specific incidents, and item seven of nine was part of the evidence that what was happening was not a collection of small isolated things but a pattern of one person’s presence overriding another person’s established routines.
The pattern was the thing. Not the individual incidents.
On the Guest Remark, One More Time
I have returned to the guest remark at the lunch many times in my own head, and I want to say one more thing about it before I close.
I do not think Patricia said it maliciously. I do not think she planned it or that she was delivering a verdict she had been quietly preparing. I think she said it in the unreflective way of someone who had, over eleven weeks, genuinely come to feel that the household was hers to run, and that in a household you run, you are the host.
If she was the host, I was the guest.
The logic is internally consistent. It is also wrong, and what made it wrong was not the legal documents — though the legal documents are real and I would have produced them if needed — but the prior agreement. She had been invited for four weeks. Four weeks had passed. The terms of the invitation had not changed by merit of the days continuing to accumulate.