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.”

Because it is ours.

Silas started it when he was about seven. Every single goodbye, from the school gate to the airport, from the age of seven to the age of twenty-four: don’t forget me. It was a joke, and then it was a habit, and then it was simply what that boy said instead of goodbye, and he said it to me on the eighteenth of December on the phone and I said what I always said, which was “I’ll try.”

Twenty-two hours later he was sitting on a verge with a stranger’s daughter and he used it.

Because it was what he said. Because he was twenty-four and badly hurt and he had got her out and he was, I think, saying goodbye to somebody, and that was the sentence his mouth made.

And she did what she was told. For three years, in a children’s home, with no idea who he was.