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.

It was hour by hour, for twelve days, while I slept in a chair beside our daughter with my coat over me.

I have gone through those twelve days properly, with a notebook, which is a thing I would recommend to nobody.

Day four he went home for eight hours.

Day seven he was gone from about two until seven in the evening and came back with a bag of things from the house that I had not asked for and did not need — a jumper of mine, a phone charger we already had, a book.

Day nine there was a period in the afternoon where I could not find him for about ninety minutes and he said afterwards that he had been in the chapel, and there is a chapel, and he may well have been.

I do not know what any of those hours were. I am never going to know and I have stopped needing to.

What I know is that on day seven, Etta Brann was seven years old and living eleven miles away, and somebody was looking after her, and it was not her mother, because Rhoswen has told me she was working nights that month.