I buried my eight-year-old daughter. Eight years later a new student walked into my classroom with her face, and when I finally called that girl’s parents in for a meeting, the door opened and my own husband was standing in it.

And it does not help at all, and it took me a long while to understand why.

Because he did not know that.

For twelve days my husband did not have Dr Adisa’s opinion. Nobody had it. It did not exist yet, because the thing had not finished happening.

What he had was a fever with no name, a corridor, a wife asleep in a chair, and a piece of information whose relevance no human being on earth could assess — because he was the only person alive who knew it existed.

He weighed it against something, twelve days running, and he chose.

And what he weighed it against was not our daughter’s life. He would say it was. He has said it was, in writing, at length.

It was a conversation he did not want to have in a hospital corridor.

I said that to him in the March and he did not argue with it, and the not arguing is the only reason I have been able to sit in a room with him since.

I asked him one question in that room and it is the only one I have ever wanted answered.

I asked him what he had actually been frightened of, on day one, in the first hour, before any of it got complicated.