But that’s what I thought at the time and that’s why the tin went on the shelf.”

I put the pages down on my knee.

“I would have taken her,” I said. “If you’d rung me. Any year. Any single year, I’d have driven down.”

“I know that now,” said Roberta Kean. “I didn’t know it then. I thought you’d have had four more by 2006. That’s what I thought foster people were — I thought there was always another one coming through.

I didn’t know you’d stopped.”

“I hadn’t stopped. Not in 2006.”