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.”

Prospective adopters have a book. Photographs of the family, the house, the garden, the dog if there is one. Children are shown these books.

Immy was shown three books in the September of 2024.

And the note in her file — written by a residential worker called Marta, at the time, with no idea what she was writing — says that she went through all three, went back to ours, opened it at the third page and would not give it back.

Page three of our book is the four of us at the barbecue in 2021.

She was four and a half.

She picked us out of three books because she knew a face, and then she waited fourteen months for the adults to catch up.

Kelda.

I am going to write about her properly, because for four days in the January I hated a dead woman with an intensity that frightened me, and I do not now.