Before I go into the kitchen, I need to put Nathan Lin on the page properly, because for about a year I thought of him as the man who organised a beautiful thing, and he is a more interesting and more useful figure than that.

He had been a police officer for nineteen years.

He had made lieutenant in 2021.

He worked nights by choice, because nights pay a differential of eleven per cent and because his wife works days and because somebody had to be in the house in the afternoons when Maya came home, which is a piece of arithmetic that I recognise in my own marriage and that most families are doing.

He had built the ramp himself, badly.