Your coming was long and it was complicated, which was unexpected – Tilda had been so straightforward. The first labour stabs came at three in the morning. Your mother woke me. She sat straight up in bed and spoke clearly, as if she hadn’t been asleep at all. She ordered me to collect your sister and the bags and to meet her in the front hall.

It wasn’t until the following evening that you finally emerged, grey and floppy, your mother later told me, as a dead frog. Your heart rate was low and each breath a task. Before she had a chance to see you properly, you were taken to the other end of the room and surrounded by medical staff. With rapid pulses, the doctor compressed your chest until your breathing became regular. In essence, he breathed for you, mechanically, until you could breathe on your own. You and your mother stayed in hospital for a week before we were able to take you home.

You were not an easy baby.

For two years we didn’t sleep. You made sure of that. And you were tense. You were like – you were like grinding teeth. You were like a cramp in the calf muscle. All of this burden rested with your mother and for most of that time she was irritated with me, and with Tilda. And with you. I did what I always did when life became hard. I vacated. Our toy manufacturer was only just operating out of a simple factory; we hadn’t yet branched away from Stavanger. But the company was growing, so it was easy to find reasons to stay away from home. I set up a bed in the back office and slept in it often, and I can tell you, it became a comfort to wake up to the smell of wood shavings, to wake up to the smell of glue and paint and the labours of craftsmen.

Once, I don’t know how long I’d been away, maybe it was three or four nights, I returned to a house that was dark and quiet. It was early evening, late November, more than a year after your birth. It had been snowing all day and the world was quiet; the world was dusk-blue and crystalline. I was thinking I would help your mother by wrapping you and Tilda up snug and taking you both for a night walk. There was a hill not far from our house that was ideal for sledding. I’d already seen children on it a few minutes before, when I drove past; dark, thick-limbed creatures tumbling all over the face of the slope, screaming in the near dark.

So it was this I was thinking of as I opened the front door: taking you out with the sled. But the house was cold to the bone; the radiators had not been turned on for days. I called into the dark even though I knew the house was empty. I looked on the kitchen table for a note and found no note. Your mother often took you to stay with her parents so I called there first, but they hadn’t heard from her. I tried the neighbours. I tried our friends. No one knew where my family was.