I’d gone forward, mud clagging my shoes and the legs of my jeans, my feet so heavy. I kept slipping, but I continued moving forward and I reached the edge of the shaft and I looked over. I could see Daniel at the bottom, twenty feet below me. I could see him lying there like a doll; he looked as if he was running, only he was lying flat on the mud and a puddle had formed on the bottom, he was half in, half out of the puddle. I called his name, but he didn’t answer me. I tried to climb down, but I slipped.

‘I fell too,’ I said quietly. ‘I broke many bones but I don’t remember feeling any pain; not from the bones, I mean. I couldn’t think of anything beyond Daniel.’

‘Was he dead?’ Valentina asked in a whisper.

‘Yes.’ I let out my breath. ‘And I blamed Anna.’

‘Of course you did,’ she said softly. ‘Of course you did. Any mother would have done the same. You mustn’t blame yourself for blaming her.’ Valentina’s hand was gentle on mine.

Blaming Anna kept me going; it was the blood in my veins, it was the metronome that measured my heartbeat; since Daniel’s death it had become the single, biggest part of me, it was my raison d’être.‘But I shouldn’t have blamed her,’ I said quietly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Once,’ I told her, ‘I had a headache and I went to the shops for some aspirin. I was home boiling the kettle before I realised I’d left Daniel asleep in his pushchair outside the chemist’s.’

‘We’ve all done things like that.’

‘And once, in London, he climbed onto a tube train ahead of me and the train pulled away before I could get the buggy on. A woman realised what had happened and waited with him on the platform at the next station. If she hadn’t noticed, God knows where he’d have ended up.’

‘You were lucky,’ Valentina said.

‘Very lucky.’ I sighed. ‘All Anna did was take her eye off Daniel for a few minutes while he was playing in the garden of her home where she believed he was safe.’

‘She was unlucky,’ Valentina said quietly.

And, like that, the wall around my heart came down. Because it was true. It had taken me ten years to acknowledge that Anna was not to blame for Daniel’s death. Anna wasn’t perfect, but she loved Daniel. She loved him with every ounce of her being, every beat of her heart. Even when I hated her, deep down I never doubted that. She had left him playing in the garden for a few minutes while she went inside to fix herself a drink. She hadn’t killed Daniel. She’d been hideously, appallingly unlucky.

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