It went away the way these things go away, which is that at some point you notice it has been gone for a while and you cannot say when it stopped.

But I looked, last Tuesday, coming back from Bridgeport on the Post Road at about ten past five with the light going.

She was sitting up.

She had her head against the window and she was watching the marine supply places and the storage units and the flat industrial ground behind the water go past, the way children do, at nothing, with her mouth slightly open.

Looking out of the window at a place she is allowed to see.

That is the whole of it.

That is what nineteen months and three proceedings and a hundred and four Tuesdays bought, and it is not justice and it is not closure, and I have come to think both of those are words invented for the ends of stories.

It is a nine-year-old sitting up in the back of a car with her face at the glass, and a father who did not have to look.