I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

Somebody sent me the listing.

He sent it in an email with about four lines under it about how it would sort the debt out and how Mum would have Talise and how it was only a couple of years.

It was Pike.

I have that email. I have had it the whole time, in a folder, because I never delete anything.

I went and found it that night in the hire car at about eleven o’clock and read it eleven times.

It is short. It is kind. There is a line in the middle of it that says: Mum will have Tal, she’d want to, it’d do her good to have somebody in the house.

And the last line of it is: you can’t fix anything from where you are, Dez.

That sentence had been in my head for five years. I have quoted it to two different people. I thought it was the thing that got me out of a chair in the worst month of my life.