And now he was lying in bed next to me with Felix’s empty cot beside us.

I remembered what it had been like to hold Ellie and Ava after losing Felix, and I thought of my own sister and how silly and strange it was that we didn’t speak any more, or even exchange Christmas cards.

I knew that if I asked her to come to the funeral, she would. Like a shot.

I would have to. I had to give her the chance to do the right thing. I had to give myself the chance. There would be so much sadness, so much grief. I would need her to share it.

Mark and I fell asleep together. I didn’t wake again until it was light, and I came to and for the first, miraculous second of the day, I didn’t know that Felix had died.

Twenty-One

Paula

Something had got into Daisy. She’d always been slow to learn, but sweet – or so I told myself. But suddenly I found that a little bit harder to believe. She was changing, and in some ways, not for the better.

There was no reason that I could understand for it. Maybe school was harder for her now that she and her peers had less time to play and more lessons? The rest of them were crazily far ahead – reading and writing and signing their names and making clay models of Tudor houses; they were a bunch of prodigies, as far as I was concerned, and it was both phenomenally impressive and depressing to see what they could do. I had learned, over the years since Daisy’s diagnosis, to try not to compare her to them. But I didn’t always succeed.

She was my baseline. Other kids freaked me out – how quickly they learned, the things they could do, the kind of conversations they had with adults and with each other. They were virtually adults themselves. And Daisy just wasn’t. She was much more like a toddler. As to whether she’d ever catch up… I had my doubts.

I had no idea whether she was aware of being treated differently to the others – of having her own personal teaching assistant and workstation, a chair and desk in the classroom that was set up just for her. On the whole, she was magnanimously accepting of all the extra help she benefited from. I didn’t let myself think about how she would feel about it if and when she became more self-aware, or the questions and answers that would might follow. I tried to be ruthless with my thoughts: I had discovered it was all too easy to sink into a self-obliterating cycle of despair if I started worrying about the future. The future would have to take care of itself, anyway. I had quite enough to be getting on with in the present… especially as, when Daisy got really upset, she had started taking it out on me.

Around the time of the diagnosis, I’d been able to tell anybody who asked me that Daisy wasn’t aggressive. I saw that as a blessing; it meant she wasn’t liable to hurt other children or the staff at school, and it eased her way to being accepted, even liked. She didn’t lash out, even when she was really worked up and upset. If she was going to take out her anxiety on anyone, it was herself. She had a habit of biting her hands when she was anxious, and the autumn she moved up to primary school, the skin on her hands got so rough where she’d sunk her teeth into it that it reminded me of elephant hide.