My wife was four hours late coming home and her phone went straight to voicemail, so I checked her location on our tracking app — but when I drove there and saw what she was doing, I completely forgot how to breathe.

And between eleven and midnight, in the twenty minutes it took me to ring a ward and a sister and two friends and a police dispatcher, I built something.

I want to be honest about what it was.

By about ten to twelve I had decided there was somebody else.

Fully. Not as a fear — as a conclusion. I had a name in my head. A doctor from her ward who she had mentioned about four times in a year, and I had him, and I had the whole of it, and I was already deciding how I was going to be about it.

And the reason I opened that app was not to find out if she was safe.

It was to find out where she was.

Those are different things and anybody who tells you otherwise has never sat on a sofa at midnight doing what I was doing.

It is a funeral director’s.

The building on Kesteven Way belongs to a man called Wilf Bryce who is sixty-eight and who has been doing that job in this town since 1981.

And my wife has been going there, unpaid, at night, whenever a child from her ward dies, since the October of 2014.

For eleven years.

She washes them and dresses them and does their hair.

That is it. That is the whole of what she does and I want to write it plainly because when I have told people they assume something more complicated.

She is not a mortician. She is not qualified for any of it and she does not do anything that requires qualification. Wilf Bryce does all of that.

She does the part a mother would do.

And the reason is that a great many parents cannot be in that room. Not because they do not want to — because they physically cannot, and they are then not in the room, and the alternative is that it is done properly and kindly by a stranger who did not know the child.

So she does it. Because she did know them. Because she had them on her ward for eleven days or nine months and she knows they had a thing about their fringe.

And what I actually saw in those twenty minutes, which I am going to describe once and then leave alone.

It was not frightening.

That is the thing nobody expects when I say it, and it is the only reason I can write about it at all.

The room was bright and clean and ordinary and there was a radio on somewhere further back, quietly, playing something with talking on it.

And there was a child on a table under a sheet with only her head and shoulders out of it, and my wife was standing at the top end with a comb.

And she was talking.

Not to me and not to herself. To her. Quietly, in the ordinary voice she uses with Rosa when she is doing something fiddly — the running commentary you do to a child who is sitting still for you.