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.

I stood outside that door in the cold for about forty minutes and then I went back and sat in my car in the dark round the side.

And I have been asked by three people why I did not go in, and I have said a few different things, and the truth is that I did not have the right.

Whatever was happening in that room was not for me. I had turned it down in 2016.

So I sat in a car park until ten to one in the morning.

And she came out and put her bag in her SUV and saw my car.

And she did not jump. She stood there for a second and then she walked over and got in the passenger side and shut the door.

And neither of us said anything for about two minutes.

And then she said: “How long were you there?”

And I said about an hour.

And she said: “Did you see?”

And I said yes.

And she nodded and looked out of the windscreen and said one thing, which is the only thing she said in that car park.

“She had it in a French plait in every photograph her mum brought in. Every single one. And I can’t do them.”

Her mother had brought photographs onto the ward. Which is what parents do, so that the staff see the child rather than the patient.

And in every one of them there was a French plait.

And my wife, who is forty-one kinds of competent and cannot do a French plait, stood in a room on Kesteven Way at half past eleven at night and tried five times.

What we said afterwards, which took about three weeks and was not one conversation.

She was not angry with me. That is the thing I keep getting stuck on.

I would have preferred anger. I have spent a year wishing that woman had been angry with me in 2016.

And when I asked her, in the December, why she never brought it up again, she said the same thing three times in different ways and the clearest one was this:

“Because you were right that you couldn’t hear it. I could see you couldn’t. And there wasn’t a version where I made you hear it that was any good for either of us.”

So she took it out of the house.

And I said: for nine years?

And she said: “It wasn’t nine years of anything. It was about six evenings a year.”

Which is true, and which is somehow worse, because six evenings a year for nine years is not a crisis. It is a routine. It is a thing a person builds and maintains and gets good at hiding.

And I asked her whether she had ever wanted to tell me.

And she said yes, twice.

In 2019, and in the March of 2023, and she can name both of them and she did not.