Everything, as far as they knew it, and nothing that mattered.
We were told there was a second vehicle. We were told the driver of the other vehicle had also died. We were told Silas was not at fault.
And I asked — in the family room at St Ida’s, at about two in the morning — whether anybody else had been involved.
And a police liaison officer called Faye said: “There was a child in the other car. She’s been taken to Harlan General and she’s not badly hurt.”
And I said — and I remember the exact words, and I have had to talk about them on Wednesdays for a year — I said: “Right.”
That is it. That is the entire amount of attention I gave, in December 2022, to a three-year-old who had been in the other car.
I was not a monster. I had been told two hours earlier that my son was dead.
But there is no version of this in which I did not know that a child existed.
I knew. I filed it somewhere I did not have to look at it, and I never once asked what happened to her, and nobody ever told me, and eleven months later a brown envelope came that would have told me her name and I put it in a drawer.
And the fourteen months, which I have gone back through with a diary since the January and which are unbearable in a completely new way now.
We first went to Bramfield in the March of 2025. Eleven visits before she came home.
She was shy, everybody said so, and on the fourth visit she asked Pete to do a jigsaw and on the sixth she took my hand in the corridor without being asked.
And on the ninth — and this is in nobody’s notes, it is in mine, because I kept a diary of the visits the way you are advised to — she asked me whether we had any other children.
I said we had a son called Silas and that he had died.
And she said: “Okay.”
Nothing else. She went back to the cards.
I wrote it down that night as asked about S, took it well.
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.”
“What did you say, love?”
She looked round at me.
“He told me not to forget him.”
