Thank You For Your Honesty

He always knew the exact moment to press record. Just before the crying started — but not too far before. Tape couldn’t be wasted on people who weren’t going to cry. Only the truly sorry cried.

The chairs were arranged in a wide circle at the centre of the room, and every seat was taken. It was early, and the faint smell of instant coffee still lingered throughout the Community Centre. Most people had spoken today, but they hadn’t gotten to him yet. The old man never spoke. His silence had become something people worked around, like furniture. He was the oldest person at the Men’s Behaviour Group by a margin and he imagined that, in his silence, the others had landed on all kinds of cruel assumptions about him. Most of the men here were either very large men, or very small men. What they had in common was that they all looked like men who weren’t used to being quiet. But he didn’t mind the silence. He’d grown quite accustomed to it.

They had all been speaking for a while now. Others talked about the progress they’d made with their anger issues, while others had mentioned slips into road rage, arguments with colleagues, children, wives. In truth, he wasn’t an angry man. He never had been. But that wasn’t why he was here.

The Support Worker opened the conversation up to the room: “Has anyone here ever had a moment where they realised the impact of their anger, right as it was happening? Those moments can teach us a lot. If anyone’s open to sharing, we’d really appreciate hearing it.” He was young, bearded, softly spoken. The kind of man people trusted without knowing why.

The eyes of the room swung across the circle in wide arcs, searching. A man, one of the large ones, cleared his throat, shifting in his chair.

“When I hit my wife,” he said.

The room pulled tight with silence. Nobody’s eyes were searching any more. They were all firmly planted in the worn carpet beneath them. A man across the circle picked at a flaking strip of faux-leather on his chair, rolling the peeled edge between his fingers like string.

After a pause, the Support Worker spoke again: “Can you tell us what happened? And what made you realise, in that moment, that it was anger?” He paused, scanning the group with soft eyes. “And just a reminder — this is a judgment-free space. Nobody here’s looking to blame or shame. We’re here to listen. To help each other make sense of it.”

The man cleared his throat a second time. The old man read his face, and then clicked the record button of the tape recorder in his pocket.

“I hit her in the kitchen. I remember because she was holding a plate, and it smashed on the floor.” The man began to swallow harder. A twitch passed through his jaw, a tremble gathering in the muscles around his mouth. The old man adjusted his grip on the recorder, ensuring the microphone was at the opening of his pocket. “She didn’t shout, she didn’t scream. She just looked at me. And that look — her face. It was her face. The way she looked at me. I just couldn’t believe that I’d actually—” the last few words were cut off as he pinched the space between his eyes, stifling the tears. His face was scarlet red now. The Support Worker watched him thoughtfully, resting his chin in his palm.

“And what did your reaction to your actions tell you?” asked the Support Worker.

The man thought for a moment, crying now, and moved his hand back to his lap. He took a few deep breaths, before: “I saw it, for a moment. What I was — what I had become, from her eyes. It was like looking into a mirror, and it disgusted me. I will always be sorry for what I did — but that doesn’t make it right.”

The Support Worker nodded slowly. “That’s a really tough thing to admit. You’ve taken a good step today. Thank you for your honesty.”

Cried. Spoke clearly. Regret obvious. One of the better ones.

The recorder clicked off.

The next morning, he walked to the park. It was the same route, same time, same coat. The recorder stayed in his pocket. He found his bench, and lowered himself in stages, one hand on the bench, the other on his thigh. The kind of sitting that had become a task in itself. On the other side of the path, a small river wound past. The water was more blue, here in the park, than when it ran through the city. He sometimes wondered if the river was happier here, moving through a small stretch of nature, if it felt softer. Above, the young leaves shivered in the breeze — early spring, still soft and green.

Did the trees dread the cold like he did? Did they feel themselves dying in autumn, or just fading away? He liked to think they knew. That they felt the change. That they minded. He breathed in the earthy smell of the park deeply. Of course it resented winter. Everything did. What happened to all that buried rage, when spring returned? A gust of wind blew harshly across him, mid-thought. He readjusted his long coat, realising that he had just felt the answer to his question. The wind. The wind. The blowing, gusting, bellows of the world. A leaf came loose. Not old — still young. It fell, spun, landed softly on the water. The river took it. And just like that, it was forgiven. The wind didn’t punish. It carried. It swept. It made room. And life begins anew. Space for a new leaf. Maybe this was what dying did to a man; made him look at things squarely for once. Rang in the courage to really consider what it had all been about.

He closed his eyes, drew another deep breath, and let the wind slowly roll over his face. She used to hate the wind. Said it made her feel exposed. He wished she could feel this one, nonetheless. She would have hated it, but they’d have laughed about it later.

From behind him, a child began to cry. One shrieking wail, then another. Loud noises like that put the old man on edge. A moment later, the voice of a mother: soft, tired, kind. The crying quieted.

The old man smiled.

The next day was Saturday, and Saturday was for the other group — the one for the drinkers and the rest. Same building, different faces. No overlap in membership, luckily.

The old man had never been much of a drinker. A port or sherry with her, now and then, when there was something to celebrate. That was about it. And even that had been a long time ago.

Someone was already speaking when he arrived. He wasn’t usually late. A button had come loose on his coat, and it took him ten minutes to thread the needle. She used to do that sort of thing for him. He never quite learned the knack.

“I was the one who gave it to him,” said a younger man, slouched in his chair, voice flat — like the story he was telling had happened to someone else. “It wasn’t even mine. I was holding onto it for a friend. I’d done it before and I thought it’d be fun… but- and then he- it was too much for him. How was I supposed to know?”

The chairs were a mess — a lopsided circle. Heads nodded, not quite in agreement, just… rhythm. It seemed like the man had been talking for some time already.

“He wasn’t even into anything, back then,” the man continued. “Okay, yeah, a bit of weed. Coke, sometimes. But not really. I thought he’d like it. I mean — it was meant to be fun, y’know? Except he - he hadn’t done anything like that before and… probably wouldn’t have. If it weren’t for me.” The man finally looked up from the floor, searching the faces of the circle. No one looked back for long. The old man kept his finger on the record button, but hadn’t pressed it yet.

A new speaker, even younger than the first, shuffled forward on his seat. The Support Worker hadn't shown up to mediate, but the group quieted and faced him. His voice cracked from the first word. Eyes already red. Hands clenched. This one might cry.

The old man clicked record. Reflex. The kind of pain that breaks a man always announces itself.

“I’m just…” the man started, swallowing, “I drank a bottle of cough syrup this morning. I flushed the drugs weeks ago. All of them. But I’d… I’d forgotten about the cough syrup. I just drank it without thinking. I told my— I lied to my sponsor. I told her that I didn’t. I’m such a… such a fucking loser.”

Silence. No one judged. That was the rule. The young man sobbed into his palms, loud and sudden, like it had caught him by surprise. There was compassion, empathy in the room, but the old man stared blankly. Waited.

Nothing more came. That was it. Thank you for your honesty. The tape whirred on, recording a silence that meant nothing.

He slammed a finger onto the record button again, ending it. He stood up as quickly as he could, coat creasing in his fist. His knees complained as he stood — everything did, these days. The body has a way of reminding a man that it’s leaving soon. Bloody waste of tape, he muttered under his breath. It’s not cheap, this stuff. And the amount I get through… He left the way he’d come in. Quiet. Barely noticed.

He started going to other places. Places where confession sometimes happened by accident.

The viewing gallery at the Crown Court. He sat with the family of a burglary victim, staring through the glass, waiting for someone to crack open on the stand. No one ever did. But he recorded anyway.

The back pew of a church, Wednesday evening, faint smell of incense. Someone whispered through a curtain. He held the recorder low. Forgive me, Father. The priest’s voice was too soft to catch. But now and again, he’d catch it - remorse. Real remorse. Deep regret. People who, if they could, would turn back time to change how things had happened.

He’d sit outside the funeral home — late afternoons, when the air smelled like springtime lilies. A woman sat on the steps, speaking into her phone: I just wish I’d told him I was sorry. Click.

Hospital corridors. Train stations. The smoking area of a psychiatric unit, where a man mumbled secrets into the cigarette bin. Nobody ever saw the old man and his tape recorder.

At some point, he stopped thinking about the people. They were just voices now. Sorrow, remorse, apology. Sometimes just silence. He’d label them all the same. Man. Sad. Regret unclear. And yet he didn’t take one bit of enjoyment from it. Not for a second. The things people said — they broke his heart. This last year, since his diagnosis, he’d learned something new about the world, and the people in it.

He’d been splicing them together at night — the old way, with tape and scissors and shaky hands. Recently, it was all that the dining table had been used for.

The final tape was nearly done. A single strand of guilt, threaded together like prayer beads. Each voice a step closer to absolution, salvation.

He listened to it only once. That was enough.

The train pulled into the station at exactly quarter past eleven. Right on time. It wasn’t often he left the city - he didn’t like it. Having to work things out, locate things. Not know where to go. This place wasn’t new, but leaving the station, he realised how much the place had changed since he was last here. It seemed to be a lifetime ago. The bakery was gone. So was the off-license. But the cold came in exactly the same way. Taking the road down to the coast, he ran a hand through his hair, making it look just how it used to. What was left of it, anyway. He checked the button that he’d sewn back onto his jacket. It was holding. Not neat, not perfect - but it was holding. She’d have been proud of that. And he’d show her.

The path to the church curled up and away from the beach, much steeper than he remembered. He struggled as he took on the first few steps. And as he rose higher, the wind grew stronger. It caught at his coat, flapped at the legs of his trousers. It blew away from the church, making the ascent harder. But it wasn’t scolding, or cruel. He knew that. It was the force with which the past was removed, with which the seasons began and ended. The cassette player weighed heavy in his pocket, dragging one side of his jacket down with it. He kept a hand on it the whole way, like it might change its mind and vanish.

Grass grew up beside the stairs, sprouting in pockets, unkempt. In them, nearer the top of the ascent, dandelions grew. She loved dandelions. He picked all that were within reach, a vast bunch of them, brittle-stemmed and yellow-fingered, forming in his hands by the time the path flattened out in front of the church. She would’ve laughed at him for that. Called it tragic. She had died so long ago, and yet it was like he’d known her all his life. Like she’d been here the whole time. The sea was behind him now, but he could still hear it. Crashing and pulling, always working. His knees protested fiercely, but he was almost there now.

Rounding the church, the small cemetery was empty, as he’d hoped. He found the grave without searching for it, and laid the dandelions down before her name, where she could see them. He smiled, and braced himself with both hands. The grass bent beneath him as he eased his way down, creaking like old floorboards. He had only been here once before, and he had sat in this exact spot.

He breathed deeply, took the cassette player from his pocket, and pressed play.

The voices began speaking, words all spliced together into new sentences. Pitches rose and fell awkwardly, but their words were clear. He’d made sure of that. It was his own series of events, of the short time they’d spent together. How blissful those seven years of marriage were. How they laughed together. How she teased him.

Then came the sickness. At first a shadow over their lives — and then a thief. Every day, it took a little more. And he hated watching. He hated what it made her become, how it made him feel. And within their words, was his confession: that when the doctor had told him she would not get better, he had left. Gone to the city to hide from it. Left her alone with it; the thing that was eating her. Without children. Without siblings. Without parents. Just silence. And now, at last, he knew how much that silence must have burned.

The regret had built slowly over the years, but it had never left him. Only changed shape into something sharper, heavier. For most of his life, he avoided it - worked around it, built silence over it. But now his doctor had spoken the words she once heard: it won’t get better. And now there was nowhere else to turn. All that he had built over that remorse had vanished. He had to look at it now. He still couldn’t say the words aloud — that vile thing he had done. Out of fear, or cowardice, or selfishness. It didn't matter. Nor how often he'd thought about what her final days would have been like, knowing that he — her closest friend, her lover, who laughed with her daily - had left her there. Alone. He knew then and he knew now much she must have cried.

He had built his life around shame. He knew that, now. And what a waste of a fine thing, that was.

The final lines of the tape were the words “I’m sorry,” repeated over and again by a dozen strange voices, but none of them his. The shame was there, at the core of him.

He hoped the tape made sense to her. The voices were strangers, but they’d all cried. He only ever recorded the ones who did — the ones who felt it. Like he did. Only they were able to show it.

He looked at her name, fading in the moss. He reached out and brushed some of the dirt from the headstone, as if it would matter.

“Can I be forgiven?” he asked. “Before the end.”

And then the wind stopped blowing. The air became completely still. He waited for a long time, in complete silence. The wind never returned.

“Thank you for your honesty,” he said.

He turned and watched the tide push itself across the beach, laying down splinters of driftwood like dropped matchsticks. They scattered where the sea had left them, and they would remain there. The waves might bring more, but they will never take anything back.