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.

I have realised since that in twenty-two years of marriage I never once asked him that question myself.

Not in that form. Not is there anything I should know.

I asked him about his day and about his mother and about whether he had rung the garage. I asked him ten thousand small questions and they were all questions with a known shape, and a man who is postponing something can answer every one of them honestly for sixteen years.

I do not think asking would have got me the truth. I want to be realistic — a man who can stand in a hospital corridor for twelve days is not going to come apart because his wife asks him something over a dishwasher.

But I never gave him the chance to have to decide, and he had twenty-two years of never once being put in the position, and I have to own that that was partly the shape I kept the house in.

I have a daughter in a churchyard at Wrenfield.

And there is a girl four hours away doing something with history, who is not mine and was never going to be, and who found the whole of it in a drawer in December and went looking on her own and told nobody for three weeks because she was worried about what it would do to her English teacher.