I kept to my usual kilometre-long route, hugging a shoreline that dipped and crested like a waltz, then turned and came back. Before I reached the section of beach where you were, I felt my cold-water tolerance waning. It happens fast. To swim in water like this you have to pay close attention. The warmth in my core was slipping away, as if someone had opened a window to let the winter air in. I looked up to see how far away you were, my beacons – a bright blue blanket and two blond heads, you and your sister, bobbing about. I kicked my way back home to you, and came clumsily out of the sea on tumbling stones and bloodless feet.

You took no notice of me as I trudged and tripped my way back to our blanket. Your sister had buried you in a hole and there you were, just a head, with a wet rim of dark sand around your mouth and under your nose. Your mother, who’d been reading, who was always reading, carefully placed a strip of leather down the spine of her book to mark her place and put it on the blanket. (Books in your mother’s hands were always precious things.) She passed me my post-swim clothing: a woollen, long-sleeved top, flannel trousers, a scarf and thick socks. She poured me a mug of hot coffee from a glass bottle kept warm under blankets and handed it to me once I was dressed, and handed me also a piece of apple cake, because nothing warms a cold body better than cake. I curled around my mug of coffee and took long, sweet and indulgent gulps while you ate sand, spitting it down your chin in gritty rivulets. Crying and laughing at the same time.

As my blood, lower in temperature due to its efforts to keep my core warm, returned to my extremities, it cooled me even more and I started to shiver violently. Your mother, used to this sort of business by now, ignored me and went back to reading her book. My teeth clattered, jangling the bones in my ears. I spilled coffee over my hands.

You wanted to show me something. You asked me many times to come and see. I didn’t bother. I was cold, and I was thinking about something else.

At home under the pressure of a hot shower, I stood, swaying from side to side, warming my fingers and toes. This gentle rocking on the balls of both feet was a physical memory from when you and your sister were infants and needed to be held and moving, all the time. In those days, fathers didn’t generally hold their children so much, but I did. I just couldn’t believe the feel of you, the weight of you in my arms. You were the perfect, perfect design, in the way your smooth skin tightly contained the bones and the blood of you. The creases in your wrists and toes, the round knobs of your ankles, the sworls of your ears. Every inch of you was just as it should be.