Our daughter's twin di3d at nine days old and we let her believe she was born alone — at her eighteenth my husband carried something out of the garage and said he had started it the night her sister died.

And Dinah has started saying the name again. At Christmas. Twice. Deliberately, and while looking at me, and I want her to keep doing it.

And what I have had to take.

"I have spent eighteen years being the only person in this house still counting."

I have said that sentence to myself about four hundred times and I have said it out loud twice, and it is not true.

I was the only person still counting out loud.

Everybody else in that house was counting silently, on purpose, because of me.

Russ was counting in a garage with a pencil once a year. My daughter was counting from fourteen. My mother took a photograph off a wall and my sister edited herself at a dinner table for eighteen years.

Not one of them had stopped. They had all just stopped letting me see it.

And I built the whole of my grief on being the last one who cared, and I was the only one who was allowed to.