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.

But I could not stop looking at her, and I have had to be honest about that with a woman in Corliss Street for over a year.

I never put one ounce of it on that girl.

That is the only thing in this whole account that I am certain I did right. She did not know. She never saw my face do anything. I taught her the way I taught the other twenty-eight.

She was funny in a dry way that sixteen-year-olds usually are not. She was careful with the quieter ones. She could not spell and did not care.

And she left book recommendations on my desk — actual books off her own shelf, with a torn corner of paper in the front and one line of handwriting on it.

Within about six weeks I cared about that child a great deal.

I mentioned her at home once, in the October, in the most ordinary possible way — a thing she had said about a poem.

And my husband’s face closed.

He said: please stop. Every time you compare her to Iona I lose our daughter again.

I apologised. I want that noted. I apologised to him, in my own kitchen, and I did not say her name in that house again for four months.