After our son di3d, 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.”

She was doing a great deal more work than we were, from a standing start, at four.

How she came to us.

Now the part that Bernadette Achike explained to me in a meeting room in the January, after I rang her in a state at half eight in the morning.

Bramfield House is the only residential unit for that age group inside the county. There is a children’s home in Harlan and it is twenty-nine miles away and it takes older children.

So Immy was there because that is where children in Cardew go.

And we were there because that is where children in Cardew are.

Nobody matched us. There was no clever social worker in this story and no one is at fault, and I am sorry about that because it would be a great deal more comfortable if somebody were.

But there is one thing in Immy’s file that is not a coincidence, and it is the thing that finished me off.