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.
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