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.

myself, because they had done nothing wrong and had paid deposits to people who had no right to take them.

Three of them got refunds through the bank.

The fourth was Nell and Ayo, in September, who had been saving for two years and had already sent out eighty invitations with my address on them.

Nessa was past day one hundred by then. Outdoors, masked, with her consultant’s blessing.

So we did it. In the barn, at cost, with my grandmother’s white china, which it turns out was in one of the boxes in that storage unit all along.

Nessa sat on the porch in a blanket and watched the whole thing, and at about nine o’clock she asked if she could go down to the barn door — just the door, just to look in.

And she stood in the doorway in her mask for about eleven minutes, watching forty