I went to surprise my husband at the hospital with his lunch. His colleague looked at me with tears in his eyes and said: “He hasn’t told you anything, has he?”

the thing that made me put the lunch box down on a step.

He said: he asked me not to. In the April. He came in and he asked me not to tell anybody, in case it got back to you.

There is a second thing about that department that I found out later and that nobody at that hospital has said out loud.

Everybody knew.

Not about the warehouse. About the suspension.

Twenty people in that corridor, and a good half of them had known since the spring that Soren was not working there.

And for eleven months, not one of them rang me. Not one of them stopped me in a supermarket. Nobody’s wife sent a message.

That is not cruelty and I have stopped reading it as cruelty. It is the same thing every time.

Everybody assumed somebody closer had already done it.

The nurse whose christening