It is harder to recover from having watched your children watch you be left, and knowing that the image is in them somewhere, permanent, doing its quiet work.

Fifteen years earlier, I had been standing in the hallway of our modest house with nine-month-old Daisy crying in my arms, not understanding, the way only a baby can not understand, that anything at all was wrong.

Samantha, our oldest, was thirteen, and she was standing barefoot on the cold wooden stairs, watching, saying nothing, her face doing a thing a thirteen-year-old’s face should never have to do.

Chloe was eight.