My 8-year-old son gave up his lunch money to buy a little girl with Down syndrome a red dress—the next morning, our lawn was covered with lunchboxes, but what was inside the biggest one made him go pale.

She does not trust banks. She has a current account because her pension goes into it and that is the extent of it, and the reason is 1991, when a building society she had four thousand pounds’ worth of savings in went under and she got about a third of it back eleven months later.

She was thirty-two. She has never put a significant amount of money into a financial institution since.

And I knew about the lunchbox.

I had seen it once, in 2019, at her flat, when we were moving her wardrobe.

It was at the back of it, under a blanket, and she saw me see it and she said, in a completely level voice: “That’s my life in there. Don’t mention it to Ari.”

I never did. I have never mentioned it to my husband in six years and I did not mention it that Monday until he was standing at my kitchen table looking at it.