After our son died, we adopted a little girl — one evening, she noticed a photo of him, stared at it, and suddenly said, “I know him. He told me not to forget him.”
Silas was twenty-four and away at university.
That winter he was driving home for Christmas when we got the call every parent is frightened of.
There had been a crash on the Ferndown road.
By the time we got to St Ida’s there was nothing anybody could do, and I remember Pete holding me up in a corridor while I said, over and over, “He was coming home. He was supposed to be home tonight.”
After that the house was unbearable. Not sad — quiet. There is a difference and it took me about a year to work out what it was.
We hardly touched his room for months. His trainers stayed by the door. His mug stayed in the cupboard, on the left, where it had been since he was about fifteen.
