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.

That child sat there with the entire thing in her mouth and decided not to hand it to me — because she had worked out, at sixteen, that it would land on me and not on him.

She was protecting me. That is what those eleven seconds were.

And then she said the line about not causing problems, and I said all right, and I booked the meeting, and I put a note in the system with her father’s name on it exactly as it appears on her file.

Which is Devlin. Not Brann.

I typed my own surname into a school system on a Tuesday afternoon and did not see it, because it is the eleventh most common thing I type and because you do not read your own name.

It was not. She had asked her mother, at Christmas, whether she could be moved to a different English class.

And her mother had said no, and had said something about not causing a problem in the middle of the year, and Rhoswen has since told me that she did not know why Etta was asking, and I believe that, and it is the single most expensive assumption anybody in this story made.