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.

PART 4

Now Etta.

Her grades collapsed in the January and the head of year had it down as a phone or a boyfriend, which is what it is eleven times out of twelve.

She had found out three weeks earlier.

Not from Gethin. Not from her mother.

From a photograph in her own house — one that had been in a drawer for years and that she had seen before and never looked at properly.

In the December she looked at it properly, and the reason she looked at it properly is the thing that has stayed with me.

It is a photograph of her father at about thirty, at somebody’s wedding, and there is a woman cropped out of the left-hand side of it.

Not cut. Folded. The print had been folded back and put in the drawer flat, and Etta had picked it up a hundred times and never opened the fold, and in the December she did.

I am in that photograph. It was my cousin’s wedding in 2004 and I am wearing green.

She did not recognise me from it. That is not what happened and it would be a better story if it were.

What happened is that a sixteen-year-old unfolded a photograph and understood, in about a second, that somebody in her house had folded it — and then she started pulling on the thread, and it took her forty minutes with a phone.