My favourites among Anna’s memories, however, were the ones involving the two of us. She had scribbled down a memory for every single day we had spent together, and would delight in choosing pages – and years – at random, before recounting them to me.

‘Oh my God!’ she would cry, hooting with laughter. ‘I had forgotten about the time you mistook a tube of mustard for one of toothpaste and chewed a hole in it.’

Apparently, as a baby, I liked nothing more than taking items out of her shopping bags one by one and testing them with my emerging teeth. Anna said she could leave me on the floor for hours, but that every single apple, banana or nectarine she ever put into the fruit bowl would be decorated with tiny fang marks.

At one of my little friends’ fifth birthday parties, I was so scared of the clown they hired to do tricks for the kids that I squeezed myself into the airing cupboard up on their landing and got myself stuck behind the water tank. At the end of her memory for that day, Anna had written, ‘Comic Relief may pose problems!’ and later explained that my resulting terror of all-things red-nosed had even stopped me from wanting to visit Santa’s Grotto at the local shopping centre that Christmas, for fear of running into Rudolph.

There were more recent memories, too, of trips to the cinema, dinners out, and even the odd line or two about arguments the two of us had. With the addition of time and hindsight, both Anna and I were always able to laugh these away with ease, bickering instead over which of us had been the more foolish in said row, then getting the giggles as we realised the irony of what we were doing.

In the weeks after Anna died, I floated around the house like a leaf on the wind, tumbling down to howl in corners and weep across chairs. Occasionally, David and I would find ourselves in the same room, desperate to comfort each other but unable to find the right words. Instead, he would clutch me to him with a fierceness that frightened me, and I would stand there, stock still, my arms by my sides, immobilised by sadness, and with no idea how to bridge the metaphorical gap that had opened up between us.

I didn’t forget Anna’s memory book so much as not allow myself to think about it, just as I fought not to recall any details about her, or our life together. For a long time, it was easier to remain in a state of flux, somewhere between shock and acceptance. To give in to the grief was too terrifying a prospect, the pain it promised too devastating.