There had been a crash on a lonely stretch of highway.

The car had left the road, and there had been a fire, and my husband had died in it, and the fire had done its terrible work so completely that there could be no ordinary identification.

They knew who it was, they told me, by other means: by the belongings found with the body, by the wedding band still on the hand, by the testimony of the one man who had survived.

The survivor was Sebastian.