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.”

That is it. That is the entire amount of attention I gave, in December 2022, to a three-year-old who had been in the other car.

I was not a monster. I had been told two hours earlier that my son was dead.

But there is no version of this in which I did not know that a child existed.

I knew. I filed it somewhere I did not have to look at it, and I never once asked what happened to her, and nobody ever told me, and eleven months later a brown envelope came that would have told me her name and I put it in a drawer.

And the fourteen months, which I have gone back through with a diary since the January and which are unbearable in a completely new way now.

We first went to Bramfield in the March of 2025. Eleven visits before she came home.

She was shy, everybody said so, and on the fourth visit she asked Pete to do a jigsaw and on the sixth she took my hand in the corridor without being asked.