She said: “Don’t.

The eighteen months I was on it kept my children alive and I’m not going to let you turn getting off it into the good bit.”

No contact with anybody from her New York life, by her own choice, and this is the one that took me longest to understand.

She did not hide.

She was findable.

But she did not reach out to a single person from that year after the first six months, and when I asked her why, she said:

“Because every one of them would eventually have asked the obvious question, and I would have had to say out loud, to somebody who knew you, that you had signed a paper saying you didn’t want them.