As I knelt there in the drizzle, I thought of all the ordinary daughterly things I would never get to do, the Sunday visits, the flowers on birthdays, the one-sided conversations at the graveside that are how the living stay close to the dead.

I had been robbed of my father in life by men who wanted his patents, and now I was robbed of him in death too, given his grave before I was ever given his living presence in any form I understood.

And yet, kneeling between my two parents at last, I found that the ache was not only grief.

It was also, strangely, a kind of arrival.

All my life I had come from nowhere, belonged to no one, had no place to lay flowers and no names to speak.