Jennifer was not here. Of course she wasn’t. She was where she had been ever since the day it happened, in jail in Béziers, and she was not expected to get bail while prosecutors argued about the charges she should face. We had agreed a story, a narrative of what had happened, to ensure that Lucy and Jake were shielded from blame – in exchange for our silence on everything else.

The thought of her made me cold with fury.

Ahead of us, a small coffin covered in white lilies was laid gently on a stand by the altar. Sean stepped back with the other pallbearers as they turned to the cross and bowed, as one. How he found the strength to do this, I will never know.

He returned to me, his face ashen.

Lucy cried quietly beside her father. She had finally opened up to me about Alex Bayley, about what went on between them and what he did to her. She has shown me the old scars under her ribs, the fresh ones on her forearms that followed the news about his death. For today she has agreed to play the piano, a piece by Debussy, but I wondered if she would be capable when we reached that part of the service. I was certainly in no fit state to do a reading, or a tribute, or anything so private in such a public forum. Sean would speak for us both.

We have talked about what he will say. The words he will choose when he walks to the front of the church and stands at the lectern. There is so much to say, a world of emotion and experience and shared life, and yet words are supremely inadequate. Words are clumsy and blunt, hopelessly crude as a means of expressing our love, our loss, our heartbreak. But words are all we have now.

My mind drifts back to France, and I think of a boy. My brave boy, the day before that fateful day. I had found him with cuts and grazes on his hands and arms, mud and blood on his knees, tears on his face. His T-shirt torn. Still shaking with adrenaline but refusing, steadfastly, to tell me what had happened. Only later did I find out about the dare: to jump across the crescent gap at the cliff edge.

An ‘initiation ceremony’ to be part of an older boys’ gang.

A jump that fell just too short.

A moment of pure panic, his hands scrabbling for a lifeline.

A thick looping tree root below the edge, just strong enough to hold a small boy’s weight.