Fifteen minutes before the taxi, my six-year-old put her arms round my waist and whispered that when I travel, her stepmother puts something in her juice and then films her. I looked at the kitchen. Cora was standing in the doorway smiling, still holding the glass.

At eight I walked back into my own house through the side door.

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PART 2 — THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY

Tamsin died four years ago, in the February, eleven weeks after a diagnosis.

Mina was two. She does not remember her and she has about nine things she says about her that she has assembled out of photographs and out of what her grandmother tells her, and she says them like facts, and I have never corrected one of them.

For three years it was me and her. Work, the school run, plain dinners, a bath, two books, and questions at half past seven at night that no six-year-old should have to ask.

Cora came into that in the spring of last year. We married ten months before that Tuesday morning, which everybody told me was fast and which I did not want to hear.

And she was, for a long time, extraordinary.

She never once asked me to take a photograph down. She never got that look when Mina talked about her mother. She came with Mina and Rosalind every February to put flowers out at Sable Point, and she stood back and let them do it.

I took all of that for kindness. That is the sentence I will be carrying for the rest of my life.