She was never rude to him and she never said anything about it to anybody.

She simply stopped being somewhere he was, in the way that a thirteen-year-old girl can completely remove herself from another child’s day inside a building of eight hundred and forty people, which is an extraordinary piece of logistics that she performed, in a wheelchair, for forty-three school days.

Julian noticed on about day four and did not tell me for five weeks.

When he did tell me, in the kitchen, in the November, he said: “I think I ruined it.”