After our son died, we adopted a little girl — one evening, she noticed a photo of him, stared at it, and suddenly said, “I know him. He told me not to forget him.”
Silas was twenty-four and away at university.
That winter he was driving home for Christmas when we got the call every parent is frightened of.
There had been a crash on the Ferndown road.
By the time we got to St Ida’s there was nothing anybody could do, and I remember Pete holding me up in a corridor while I said, over and over, “He was coming home. He was supposed to be home tonight.”
After that the house was unbearable. Not sad — quiet. There is a difference and it took me about a year to work out what it was.
We hardly touched his room for months. His trainers stayed by the door. His mug stayed in the cupboard, on the left, where it had been since he was about fifteen.
Neither of us knew how to live in a house that did not have him in it.
Almost two years on, I said something to my husband that I had been turning over since about the summer.
“He had such a big heart, Pete. If he was here I think he’d want all this going somewhere it’s needed.”
And that is how we started.
We visited Bramfield House for several months, and that is where we met Immy, who was six.
She was shy at the start, and each time she was a little less so, and in the October she came home with us.
On her second day, Immy was on the living-room floor with her cards and Pete and I were doing dinner.
And then she went quiet.
When I came in she was standing by the shelf, looking up at a photograph in a frame — the three of us at Silas’s graduation weekend, on a wall outside his halls in Harlan.
She pointed at him.
“I know him.”
