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.

It has happened twice more since and I have never once brought it up and I am not going to.

Because that is what five years of it actually leaves. Not a number in a court document.

A girl of fifteen who has everything she needs and who still, some days, without deciding to, puts half of something away for later.

I sent sixty transfers. I never missed one. I used to think that was what it meant to be her father.

It turns out you can do a thing perfectly for five years and still not have done the only thing that was required — which was to ask somebody a question I did not want the answer to.

It would have taken about eleven seconds.

I had two hundred and sixty Sundays.

There is one more thing and then I have finished.

In the October, about two months after she moved in, Talise asked me something at the kitchen table, out of nowhere, while she was doing homework.