The frame itself was pretty unexceptional but what made it special was the shot I placed in it, of Jenny working at her desk, in the studio – a mesmerizing Jenny amidst her tools and her ideas and her paper. The youth of her face.

When I gave it to her she ran her hand along its surface and I mentioned that the wood was ash and she seemed impressed by that. We spoke of the poignancy of Christmas and how it makes you think about the people that you have lost. She talked about her mother and I told her more about Brian, his terrible head injury. I talked about contusions, about the exact condition the drunk driver had left him in, how Brian’s skull had been pushed into his brain.

Her kiss was different this time. It wasn’t like our first Christmas together when we were in some kind of a frenzy, when a sense of urgency overcame us and we wouldn’t linger for the sake of lingering. This felt slower, better, more relaxed. Perhaps the connection through loss created an intimacy.

Jenny missed her mother. She spoke of the energy of her as she strove every year to make Christmas in their house the best day of the year. And it was, up until Jenny was twelve and she lost her and it marked the end of Christmas as being the perfect time. Many of the memories that she held dear were diluting that little bit more, year by year. Memories that are so vital you are sure you will recall them forever but you find you cannot catch them and keep them and that is a terrifying fact.

I felt for her. Her father had tried to continue where her mother left off. He read her favourite Christmas stories even when she became too old really to be read to, but he wanted to keep the tradition alive. But it wasn’t the same, his voice wasn’t the same, the joy of Christmas was forever extinguished for Jenny’s father after his wife died and that realization was in his intonation, and Jenny heard it. You cannot bring somebody back, and Christmas is the worst time to try and do it, everyone knows that. Every year since, Jenny celebrated Christmas with her father, just the two of them, but it wasn’t a celebration in the true sense of the word, it was a day that they got through and at the end of the day, her father would say, that it was another Christmas over and Jenny never knew how to respond.