The floor of the world dropped out from under me.

Ottoline had planned even this.

She had made herself, years ago, a name on my daughter’s pickup list, against exactly this day, and I had signed the form myself and thought it was love.

There is a specific terror that belongs only to a parent, and I met the whole of it standing in that bright, ordinary front office with its cheerful bulletin boards and its smell of pencil shavings.

It is the terror of ten minutes. Ten minutes is nothing — the length of a song, a spilled coffee, a red light.

And ten minutes was the distance between me and my daughter, a gap that had opened while I was still driving, that was widening with every second I stood there, that I could feel stretching out ahead of me like a road with no end.