I want to be very clear about that, because people always want the moment where somebody could have stopped it, and there wasn’t one.

There were about four hundred moments each of which was too small to be worth it.

At ten past ten I heard the cottage door, and then footsteps on gravel, and then Corinne’s voice, bright and completely ordinary, calling my daughter’s name.

Part Three: Twenty-Two Minutes

I watched them from the garage window with my phone in my hand.

Corinne was sixty-four and looked considerably younger, and that morning she was dressed the way she dressed to go into town — good coat, scarf, sunglasses pushed up on her head.

She was carrying a canvas bag and her keys and she was chatting.