At 3:17 in the morning the police rang to tell me my husband had been killed in a crash, while he was asleep beside me with one leg over mine. The officer said: leave the room without waking the man next to you.

There was a brother.

I knew that in the abstract, the way you know a thing about somebody’s family. Cassian had a twin. The twin died at four. There was an accident at a lake in 1997.

It came up perhaps four times in six years and every single time it was Cassian who closed it, not his mother.