Written promises had a way of making me think of contracts, and he had spent years treating his personal life like a set of responsibilities to dispatch.

But we tried.

We sat at the kitchen table on a rainy Saturday and made a list without turning it into a competition over who had suffered more.

Callum said he needed to be allowed to feel frustrated without having every frustration solved for him.

I said I needed him to tell me when he was frightened instead of disappearing into a story about work.

We both wanted space for Sadie to have an ordinary childhood that didn’t revolve around medical appointments.