‘I’ll put it in my diary,’ I tell her. ‘Just give me the precise time. I’ll keep it free. Cedar’s going to be there with one of us. He’ll be okay.’

She smiles. ‘Thanks.’

I wake in the middle of the night and stay awake. No particular reason. Nothing new, anyway.

I get up for a glass of water, to stop myself lying there thinking. But the thinking’s taken hold already, as it can.

My laptop is just down the hall. I google ‘grief counselling in Anchorage’. It’s not that it’s never been mentioned, but Lacy said, ‘Really? Do you know how much that costs? And then we could have grief counselling about being poor.’ Her parents would have paid, if we’d asked them. And so could we, almost certainly. I wasn’t working then, but we could still have paid. Counselling is not an instinctive choice for Lacy though, or any of the Novotnys. Not for me either, but still. Any American TV show I grew up watching taught me they all had counselling as a rite of passage, but I’ve found myself with a family that has a frontier solve-your-own-goddamn-problems outlook.

We had all these grand parenting ideas swirling around and they got taken from us one night, just like that. And suddenly a life that had been perfectly okay had a big hole in it, and no way of filling it. I was forty-four and thought I’d never have a child and then . . . And then . . .

I click on a few of the counsellors listed, but the first one I opened stays the best. She’s maybe mid-thirties, or at least her photo tells me she is. She has tinted glasses, a coil of hair falling in front of one eye and a smile the right size. It’s there, but not all the way. She has the look of someone who could be Lacy’s friend, but with a master’s degree. She specialises in grief and loss. She believes in resilience, as we all would like to do. Her session cost is $120 to $300, sliding scale. No hint of what makes it slide. I’ve done the maths on my slice of the commission on Ellen’s house, if I can sell it. We’d be okay.

When I turn up in the morning with box blanks, Ellen asks if there’s a charge.

‘I have to give you something,’ she says, still standing in her doorway, one hand against the half-open door. ‘Those boxes are ideal.’

‘You really don’t.’ They’re awkward in my arms, a stack of oversized polygons waiting to be folded and taped. ‘I have more than I can use. They would just have been recycled without ever having done anything. It’s much better if I give them to you.’

‘Well, I’m very grateful. Shall I . . .’ She reaches out for the boxes.

‘How about I take them straight through to the workshop?’ We’ll drop most of them if we try to transfer them here, I know we will. All over the dewy grass.