I’ve seen her do the best thing anyone in my family has ever done. It is very hard to be angry at somebody after you’ve seen that.

So I put it somewhere and I did well at school.

Chapter 14 — Four Hundred and Eleven

She told me in March, on a Sunday, in the car, which is where my daughter says all her hardest things because she does not have to look at me.

She had the post open on her phone. She read me the paragraph about the stairwell in a completely level voice and then she said, “I’ve had this since I was twelve.”

I pulled over. I want to record that I did not manage anything better than that — I pulled into the entrance of a garden centre and put my hazards on and sat there.

“Three years,” I said.