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.

Vivika Storr is the only adult in this entire account who did the boring, correct, uncomfortable thing inside an hour of finding out.

Everybody else in it, including me, took between three weeks and sixteen years.

PART 5

She was partly right and it has taken a year and a great deal of help to work out which part.

She was right that I should not be anything to that girl.

She was wrong about the word borrow, and she has since apologised for it, in a car park, badly, which is the only way anybody apologises for anything.

Etta was moved out of my class in the February. That was the correct decision, it was taken by the school with a safeguarding lead in the room, and I agreed with it in the meeting and I still agree with it.

I have not taught her since and I am not going to.

Here is what actually happened afterwards and it is not satisfying.

Gethin moved out in the April. The divorce went through in the spring of the following year and it was not contested and there was nothing to fight over.

He wrote to me four times. The first one is nine pages and the fourth one is half a page, and the half-page one is the only one I have kept.