Her mother pulled some strings and got her a job in the local pre-school, where she presses fat star-shaped hands into primary-coloured paints and marvels at the prints they leave behind. She cannot do it without thinking of her dead son’s fossilized feet, nor can she do it without thinking of Lenny.

For the first month, when she got home, she pressed her thigh onto the blade with the same gentle precision, but as the tablets kicked in the blade was abandoned. The pain of acceptance is a dull ache compared to the sharp release of blood, but it is constant and reassuring. As long as Beth still feels bad, she doesn’t need to cut. If she feels remorse, she isn’t a monster. She doesn’t need to punish herself with a weapon. All she needs to do is remember.

At the pre-school she wears ice-cream colours and plaits her hair back off her face. She counts up to twelve and back down again, then the same in French, cheers when her small group gets it right. Brings in snails and leaves and conkers. ‘Did you know, did you know, did you know?’ The children didn’t know but they want to. Her encyclopaedic brain turns like the windmill on the Beacon, looking for facts to fascinate. She feels a small surge of pride that she can still teach. In the afternoons she reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

When she first read that book, she thought about herself. How she was the tiger, who came and took everything and left nothing behind. She had wanted to drop the book and run, but remembered she didn’t do that any more, and then Annabelle, a small dollop of a child who smelt of Play-Doh, climbed onto her lap, and rested her head on Beth’s shoulder.

Beth was frozen initially, by the downy hair of a child under her chin, the warm weight of tiny vertebrae pushing into her chest. How she had missed Lenny then, and her razor, the kettle, blood flowing. Annabelle, oblivious, just snuggled closer, and Beth had stayed and faltered through the rest of the story.

There have been more Annabelles, and Berties too. Little stout boys in stout shoes who kick balls solemnly to her, like Lenny used to. It hurts and unhurts her over and over again. Her therapist says she is healing, tells her to embrace all her emotions, to let them out as tears, or laughter.

At work Beth is busy, consumed with slicing apples, and sorting out a row over who gets to play with the digger first, but at home there are only her mother, the TV and the space where her son should be. In the evenings, when there is nothing else to do, she reads out-of-date medical journals from the library, preparing for an exam.