I got on a plane to my mother’s hospital and my husband was eleven rows in front of me with my best friend. There was a note of hers in my handbag that she’d written on my fridge that morning.

It is that they were not being careful.

A man who has done this for eighteen months knows how to sit on an aeroplane. He has been getting on and off them three times a month since 2016.

They were in row two of a seventy-minute flight with their hands all over each other and nobody being quiet about it.

Which means one of two things. Either they had stopped bothering, or they had worked out somewhere along the line that nobody who knows me was ever going to be on a Tuesday lunchtime flight to Ardmere City.

I think it is the second one. I think that route was chosen because it was safe.

And then my mother fell over in a kitchen at Caldwell at about half eight in the morning.

Eighteen years.

And my first clear thought — and I want this down because it tells you what I am — was not about him.