As questionable a parenting technique as forcing your children to repress trauma is, it kind of worked. But I suspect that our mother also found comfort in our new, hectic routine. She’d strap us into the car, our three Disney-channel-sitcom-perfect car seats side by side, and drop us at school, head to work, then pick us up, click us in and take us to one of our activities. We were never at home. We were outrunning our grief.

Looking back, having been through trauma again as an adult (Go wait in the car), I can see another side to my mother’s actions back then. Because now I know that in the months after something so devastating, everything feels like sleepwalking. Life becomes a stuporous fulfillment of routine where even walking to the supermarket feels like you’re dragging your limbs through air as heavy as the Drying Room’s. Every basic task starts to feel like a decision, and that becomes so draining that you end up unable to make any of them. It’s winding up in the kitchen without knowing why you went in there. It’s taking us to swim school on a Tuesday instead of tennis. It’s getting two haircuts, not because you’re busy, but because you forgot we went yesterday. Our routine was intended to keep us busy, sure, but the repetition was a comfort against the burden of decision-making. A burden that, I know now, our mother wore heavily.

Everything is routine on the day in question. Breakfast is an uneventful one. Audrey straps us into the car, makes every green light on the trip and even arrives at the bank five minutes early, allowing her to make a coffee and have a quick chat with her boss, who, I’ll embellish, is wearing a blue coat and a green tie and wants to talk about the weather.

My mother has moved around roles in the banking sector since, retiring from a senior position, but on this day she was a teller. This was the 90s, when banks had a full army of neckerchief-wearing young women behind perspex windows instead of one besuited university graduate with an iPad and the audacity to make you do things yourself. The bank was very good to Mum, I’ve since learned. They were lenient about Dad’s infamy; usually it would have meant she couldn’t work there, but she was allowed to hang on to the job she had after his death made his actions public. They were also sympathetic about a couple of costly (sleepwalking) errors she made in the months after Dad died. They even offered her additional leave, but I’ll let you figure out whether she took it or not. Her first day back at work was three days after Dad’s funeral, and the only reason for that gap was because the funeral was on a Friday.