“She asked what breed. That’s it, that’s what she asked. What breed and what colour.” Lia shook her head. “Nobody’s ever asked me a normal question about Max in my whole life.”

Brenda told Paige in June, over four days, with a therapist involved. I know because Brenda called me afterward, at eleven at night, and cried for about ten minutes and then said she had to go, and we have spoken every couple of weeks since, which we did not do in the four years before.

They came in July. Three days, a hotel, Brenda’s idea and Lia’s condition — Lia said she’d meet Paige if it was somewhere neutral and if there was an agreed end time, which is the most sensible piece of emotional engineering anyone in this family has ever proposed and which she got from four years of therapy and not from me.

We did a park in Milbrook on the Saturday. Two hours.

I want to record how bad the first twenty minutes were, because I think people imagine these things going one of two ways and it went the third.

They had nothing to say. Nothing at all. Two children who had been writing to each other for three months sat on opposite ends of a bench and looked at the grass, and Brenda and I stood eleven feet away making the worst small talk of my adult life about a road closure.