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.

That is the first thing I have to live with.

She was on her own on a concrete planter in a faded school shirt. Her trainers were coming apart at the sole on one side.

What stopped me was her lunch.

No sandwich. No fruit. Nothing in a packet.

She had half a plain bread roll and she was eating it in small bites and taking her time over it.

Then she wrapped the other half in a napkin and put it in her bag, and drank from a refilled water bottle, and stood up.

I got behind a pillar before she saw me.

I followed her at a distance to the shop across the road. She looked at the hot food behind the glass for a few seconds, put her hand in her pocket and counted what was in it, and walked out without buying anything.

I had wired two thousand to my mother four days earlier.
PART 2