The night waking. Twice a night from about April, and Lia did every single one of them without ever having been asked and without ever mentioning it, and I only found out in May because I got up at two and the landing light was on.

Medication in cheese. Four tablets, three times a day, and the vet in Milbrook who was so good about the whole thing that I sent her flowers.

And the thing nobody warns you about, which is that the dog does not know. Max was happy. That was the difficult part and I would not have believed it before.

She thumped her tail whenever Lia came in the room, right through to the last week. She was interested in dinner. She was, by any measure a dog uses, having a fine time, and her body was going, and there is no way to reconcile those two facts and you have to hold both of them for months.

Lia was fifteen by then.

She had come up to my shoulder and gone past it. She had a phone she was on too much and a friend group I liked and a habit of going quiet in a way that was not sulking, which took me about a year to learn the difference on.