If your son walks out of the house one day with his wife, leaving you to take care of your grandchildren, then decides to commit suicide, and a police detective asks you whether he was having troubles anywhere, you don’t say that they were struggling for money. You give them platitudes about how expensive children are. You manipulate a comment into a half-compliment by saying that they worked hard to ensure that the boys never went without.

‘I look after the kids so that they can work. I like doing it.’

Well, they’re your responsibility now, grandma.

When you are questioned about their relationship, you don’t tell the police that your son confided in you about the affair his wife had. A mistake they were trying to work through. You don’t tell them that you started to babysit on a Tuesday evening while they went out for an hour to marriage counselling. You don’t mention that. Because you don’t want anyone to think badly of your boy. Though they already do after he left those poor kids behind, fucking them up forever, ensuring they’ll need some kind of therapy, themselves, somewhere along the line.

‘You couldn’t find a happier couple. Ask any of their friends. They were great together.’

You’re hurting. Your children shouldn’t die before you do. That’s not how it goes. That’s not how it works. You don’t want to have to explain the situation to your grandchildren. That’s not your job. You’re supposed to teach them how to cheat at cards. You’re supposed to take them for lunch and ensure that sugar makes up eighty percent of every meal. You’re supposed to get them into some kind of hyperactive state then hand them back to be dealt with while you head home for a sherry and a cigarette.

This isn’t right.

But you can’t say that, can you?

How does it make them look? How does it make you look? You want the kids to think that their parents were happy. They didn’t jump off a bridge. They’d never do that. They loved each other and their children too much to do something so stupid, so selfish.

No. It was that bad man who ran the cult. He must have brainwashed them into doing it. Tricked them, somehow.

So you tell the kids that they were perfectly happy.

And you tell the police they were absolutely content.

You tell yourself you’re doing the right thing.

But the river authorities are swimming in circles and the detectives you fobbed off are running in circles while The People of Choice dance circles around them.

All because you couldn’t give it straight.

If you could have been honest, no filters, you could have said that things were rocky in the marriage. But you still could have saved face by telling the detectives that the Lovers were having counselling because they didn’t want to throw their lives away.

You could have given them the address of the ERMA offices and led them straight to Dr Rossi and this could all be over.