He had called Margaret from the hospital and asked her to, and she had said yes, and it is the one thing in this entire account that she is glad about, because she has since read enough to know that how a child is told is a thing they carry for decades.

She did it on Sunday at two in the afternoon, sitting on the floor of her own living room, because Dr.

Alvear did not exist yet and Margaret had nothing to go on but thirty-one years of watching other people do it badly in corridors.

She used the word died.

She did not say passed or lost or gone to sleep, because she had spent three decades watching children be given a euphemism and then spend a week trying to work out where their mother had physically gone.

She said: “Sophie, your mom died last night.