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.

He took a long time over it. To his credit, he did not produce something noble.

He said: that you’d make me leave.

He said: she was eight and she was in a bed and I thought if I said it you’d tell me to get out of the hospital, and then I wouldn’t have been there.

I have turned that over for a year and I have decided it is true, and that it is also the most self-serving true thing anybody has ever said to me.

Because he was not weighing our daughter against his secret.

He was weighing our daughter against himself in a corridor — against being a man who got to stand in a corridor — and he came down on his own side twelve days running, and every single time he told himself it was for her.

And he was probably right that I would have made him leave.

That is the part I cannot do anything with. He read me accurately.

I would have got up out of that chair and told my husband to get out of that hospital, and I would have done it in about four seconds, and I do not know to this day whether that would have made me right or made me the same as him.