I came back from the pharmacy that afternoon to shouting. My son stood by the door with a suitcase and tears on his face saying he could not believe what his father had asked of him, and Ambrose said he had no other choice, and Tobias said then you have lost your son and slammed the door hard enough to knock our wedding photograph off the wall. When I begged for an explanation my husband only asked me not to ask. Tobias moved four states away and told me he loved me but would not be asked to forgive his father.

Then Ambrose died, and my son walked into the chapel late, in a pink dress, and the whole room turned, and he laid both hands on the casket and apologised for not coming sooner.

The tissue paper held a photograph. A girl of about nine, in that same pink dress, standing in front of a house I did not know. Her name was Immy. She was born the year before I met Ambrose, to a woman who died when Immy was two, and Ambrose had raised her with his sister until his sister’s family adopted her formally and asked him to step back for the child’s sake. He had honoured that for thirty one years.

What he asked Tobias to do was find her. What Tobias could not forgive was being asked to carry it alone, and to let me go on not knowing while my husband was dying.

Immy came to the house in October. She is fifty two and she has his hands and his terrible sense of direction. She wore the dress to that chapel and Tobias wore it in, because she could not come herself, and because he wanted her there anyway.

I was angry for a long time. Not at her. Never at her. At a man who decided what I could bear without once asking me.

We have Sundays now, the three of us. She calls me Nell, which is my name, and that is exactly right.

I spent thirty one years being protected from a truth I would have welcomed. Being loved is not the same as being known, and I have stopped accepting the first as a substitute for the second.