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 thought about that October evening more than almost anything else in this account.

Because I had told him three things about that girl over about six weeks — her first name, that she was new, and that she was in Year Eleven.

Three facts. And a man who had a sixteen-year-old daughter called Etta Brann sat at my kitchen table and said a sentence about grief that made me apologise.

He did not lie to me that evening. He did not say I don’t know who that is. He never said one false sentence about her in four months and I have checked, because I have gone through every conversation I can remember.

What he did was reach for the one thing in the world that would make me stop talking, and it was our dead daughter, and it worked in about four seconds.

Four months. From the October to the February.

Every single week of those four months he knew his daughter was sitting in my classroom, and he let her, and he did nothing at all, and I do not think he had a plan.

I think he postponed it. That is all he has ever done. He postponed it on a Tuesday and then again on the Thursday and then it was Christmas.