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.

The fourth anniversary was in the February, three weeks before that Tuesday. About twenty-five of us at Rosalind’s.

Mina had drawn something. She had been on it for two days, at the kitchen table, and it was a house and four people and a great deal of blue, and she wanted to show it.

She got it out and stood up on a chair with it.

And Cora came round the table and took it out of her hands and put it face down on the sideboard and left her palm on top of it.

And she said, warmly, to twenty-five people:

“Give me that, sweetheart. Nobody wants to be upset today. Daddy’s tired, aren’t you, Dash. Go and sit with Grandma.”

And people made a sound. A sympathetic one. A woman near me said, “Bless her,” and she did not mean Mina.

Rosalind Ferrier looked straight down that table at me.

Nobody said one word.

And I said, “She’s all right,” and I did not take that drawing off the sideboard, and my daughter got down off the chair and went and sat with her grandmother.

Twenty-five people heard my wife say, gently, in a room about my dead wife, that I was tired.