You remember the pain and the anger and the grief of coming apart. You remember the raised voices and worries about money and the tears of a woman who finds that she is living a different life to the one she was expecting. You remember all of that, and you remember the letter that came two days after she said she had to go to stay with her parents to clear her head.

Dear Max, I am sorry but I have to go. I never wanted this to happen. But I love him and I am expecting his baby. He has moved so don’t try looking for him . . .

You remember all of that, but you forget the love. It is a shock to be reminded of it, to admit to yourself that it existed at all, and perhaps still does.

I was parked across the road from her house on a beautiful street in a leafy south London suburb. Scout and the dog slept on the back seat.

I did not wake them.

And when another car pulled into the drive, and another man got out, and Anne smiled and kissed him on the mouth, I knew I was not going to.

I watched them go back inside the house, the new man with his arm around Anne’s pregnant waist. She looked straight at me as she closed the door. But of course by then it was far too late for anything.

What about Scout? People sometimes ask me how a mother could leave a child. All I can say is, some people get a new home. And some people get a new family. And some people – mostly they are men, but not always – they make a lifetime of excuses for themselves, and they do what my wife did.

They get a new life.

Panic drove me out there. Reality drove me back. But as the night fell black and cold, I still wanted the same thing.

I wanted my daughter to be safe.

And as I drove back to Smithfield I saw that the safest place in the world for Scout would always be with me. Because I would kill for her and I would die for her. I would do anything for Scout because Scout was my everything.

There was a crowd outside our apartment block. Friday night men and women, red faces and white teeth, loud and laughing, bottles and glasses in their hands, making no attempt to move out of the way for a man with a sleeping child in his arms and a dog on a lead beside him.