“I tried to stop, for about a year, when he was three.

Because I’d worked out where it came from and I didn’t want it in my house.

“And he’d ask for it.

He’d say the counting one. And I’d be standing in a dark room with a three-year-old asking for the only song his father ever wrote, and I’d have to decide, every night, whether to take it off him because of you.”

She shrugged.

“So I sang it.

Eleven hundred nights, probably.

And he never once asked me who wrote it, because why would he, and I never told him, because what was I going to say.”

Part Three: Eleven Minutes

I found out where she lived four days later and it is the single most humiliating fact in this entire account.