It was the advice at the time and I took it, and it was wrong, and I’d give a great deal to have that one back.”

She looked over at Sabrina, who was standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded.

“I kept your letters,” Roberta said to me. “Both of them. In a tin. I never showed her and I never threw them out and I couldn’t tell you why I did either of those things.”

She sent Sabrina to get the tin. It was a biscuit tin with a Scottish scene on it and it had four things in it and two of them were mine.

I had forgotten I wrote twice. I remembered the first one — November of 2004, four pages, which I had agonised over and which had been, reading it now at fifty-seven, considerably more demanding than I recalled.

I had asked for photographs. I had asked whether she was sleeping. I had used the phrase I only want to know she’s all right, which I have since learned is a phrase that means one thing to the person writing it and something else entirely to the person opening the envelope.