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.

Then in the January her grades fell off a cliff.

Not a slide. A cliff — a B, a D, and then two blanks in three weeks.

I found her crying over an empty test paper on a Tuesday afternoon and I knelt down beside the desk and asked her what was happening.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand and said: please don’t call my parents. They asked me not to cause any problems.

Nobody in that job can leave that sentence where it lies.

So I put a meeting in for the Thursday after school.

At four o’clock Etta sat down across from me and started crying before I had said one word, and then there were footsteps in the corridor.

The door opened.

And I could not get any air in, because the man standing in it was my husband.

I said: you?

Gethin did not look at me. He looked at Etta and he said her name, and it was the way you say the name of a child you have said it to a thousand times.

Etta is sixteen.

She was born four months after Iona.

PART 2

Everybody goes to the affair. I understand why, and it is not the thing.