I buried my eight-year-old daughter. Eight years later a new student walked into my classroom with her face, and when I finally called that girl’s parents in for a meeting, the door opened and my own husband was standing in it.

She said: I would say the same thing under oath and I have said it under oath about other cases.

Then she said: I am telling you this because you asked me to be straight with you, and because I have watched people spend twenty years on the other version of this question.

I asked her one more thing and I nearly did not.

I asked whether she remembered him.

She said yes. Immediately, without checking the file, which told me more than the answer did.

She said she remembered a father who asked very good questions and who took notes, and who was the one who asked about the tests rather than about the outcome, and that this is not as common as people assume.

She said: I remember thinking he was frightened and coping with it by being useful.

I sat in that chair and thought about a man standing in a corridor with a notebook, asking a consultant good questions about tests, and holding a thing in his pocket that those tests could not reach.

Dr Adisa looked at my face and said: you’ve thought of something.

And I said no.

She let that go, which I appreciated, and which I think she saw straight through.

I believe her. I have read my notes of that conversation four times and I believe her completely.

And it does not help at all, and it took me a long while to understand why.

Because he did not know that.

For twelve days my husband did not have Dr Adisa’s opinion. Nobody had it. It did not exist yet, because the thing had not finished happening.

What he had was a fever with no name, a corridor, a wife asleep in a chair, and a piece of information whose relevance no human being on earth could assess — because he was the only person alive who knew it existed.

He weighed it against something, twelve days running, and he chose.

And what he weighed it against was not our daughter’s life. He would say it was. He has said it was, in writing, at length.

It was a conversation he did not want to have in a hospital corridor.

I said that to him in the March and he did not argue with it, and the not arguing is the only reason I have been able to sit in a room with him since.

I asked him one question in that room and it is the only one I have ever wanted answered.

I asked him what he had actually been frightened of, on day one, in the first hour, before any of it got complicated.

He took a long time over it. To his credit, he did not produce something noble.

He said: that you’d make me leave.

He said: she was eight and she was in a bed and I thought if I said it you’d tell me to get out of the hospital, and then I wouldn’t have been there.