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 every ninth of September he went out to the garage after dinner and stayed about an hour.

I never asked. I assumed he wanted the quiet, the way I wanted the laundry room.

The party was about thirty people.

Folding tables in the garden, a sheet cake from the supermarket with her name on it in blue, my brother Ray still at the barbecue at half seven.

She opened the car keys and screamed and got Russ round the neck.

And then he asked everybody to give us a minute, and they all drifted towards the house with their plates.

And he went to the garage and came back carrying something.

And I had never seen it before in my life.

Eighteen years in that house. Not once.

He put it down in front of her and told her she had not been born on her own, and he told her the name.