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.