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 told me she spent that whole morning working out what she was going to say to me.

I asked her what she had settled on.

And she said: I was going to say sorry.

That is where five years put a fifteen-year-old.

She had done nothing. She had been hungry and top of her year and had protected me every single week for five years, and she had spent a morning rehearsing an apology for a laptop she never received.

That is the sentence I would give to anybody two thousand miles from a child.
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They will apologise. Whatever is happening to them, if you are far enough away and you only ever ask the easy questions, they will get there first and they will apologise to you.

And you will feel, for about four seconds, like a man who was right.