My parents told me to empty my farmhouse for their forty anniversary guests. I said my daughter was eleven days out of a bone-marrow transplant. Mum said: “Lock her upstairs.” I agreed — and on Saturday the sheriff was waiting at my gate.

thirty-eight years and has never once had to ask for it.

And here is the part that took the ground out from under me.

While Nessa was in hospital — eleven weeks in the transplant unit, with me sleeping in a plastic chair and going home twice to get post — that house was used four times.

A sixtieth in the June. Two weddings in the July. A christening in the August.

There are photographs. Somebody tagged the venue.

Forty strangers dancing in my living room in August, in front of the fireplace I rebuilt, while my daughter was on day thirty-one and I was learning to say the word engraftment without my voice going.

They had a key. Of course they had a key. They had one for eleven years, from before it was mine, and I never asked for it back, because what kind of a daughter asks for a