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.

She has written to me once. It is two pages and it is mostly about Pike, and there is one line about Talise, and the line is she was always fed.

I have read that line perhaps a hundred times.

It is true, in a way. Nobody in that house was starved. There was food in it.

She was fed at the level of a household with no income, in a house receiving between two and three thousand pounds a month, and a seventy-one-year-old woman has decided that this is the same thing as being fed, and she is going to go to her grave holding onto that sentence.

Talise is fifteen.

She lives with me now. She moved in the August and I took a role back in Hallowbridge at about two-thirds of what I was making, and we are fine, and I use that word carefully.

She did four sessions with somebody and then said she did not want to any more, and I did not push, and then in the December she asked to start again and now she goes every other Tuesday.