He Wanted You to Have This

A dying person may leave one memory to one living person.It arrives in twelve sessions of eight minutes. And every session takes one of your own in exchange. You do not get to choose which.Nell Vasey decides who is allowed to.She has refused four hundred and eleven people, and across the service she is known for being strict, because she is not refusing paperwork. She is refusing to let anyone pay this.Then her father dies, and leaves one to her.The rules she helped write bar her from reviewing her own bequest. So she goes in blind, eight minutes at a time, into a dark hallway in the winter of 1994 -- where she is six years old, and her father is kneeling in front of her on his bad knee, telling her she has dreamed it.There is a hole in what he left her. She is the only person alive who can see it.He applied three times. He was refused twice, on the ground that the memory materially involved a living person who had not consented -- a person who is still alive, and who Nell still has Sunday lunch with. He got through on the third attempt by cutting her out of it entirely.So what arrives, in twelve fragments, is eight minutes of a hallway with a woman removed from the middle of it.And every session Nell spends looking takes something of hers she will never get back. A name. A face. Her father's voice saying the sentence she has carried since she was six.He had eight minutes. He spent them on the worst thing he ever did.He Wanted You to Have This is a quiet, exact and devastating novel about memory, belief, and the cost of being believed.Also by A. T. Boaghi: In Between Worlds and Do Not Undo This.A note for readersThis novel deals with harm to a child within a family, with a child being disbelieved by a parent, with bereavement, and with progressive memory loss. The harm itself is never depicted.