After dropping my husband off at Houston’s airport for a business trip, my eight-year-old daughter grabbed my arm and whispered, “Mom, please don’t take us home

I had not thought about that once. Not in the car, not in the car park, not for four months.

I had used her as a backup drive.

She has not held it against me and we still work the same shifts and she asks after Nia every single week, and I have never once been able to say sorry properly, because the only honest version is: I did not think of you as a person that morning. I thought of you as a copy.

Chelo.

She sees Nia once a month.

That took until the April and it took a mediator and it was the hardest decision I have made since the seventh of October.

Because she told me to take Nia and not complicate things. She said that on a phone, at seven o’clock in the morning, when she already knew.

And she was wrong, and she was managing her son instead of ringing 999, and if I had done what she said there would have been a fire in a terrace with Wilf at number nine in it.

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