‘Oh, really? So soon? OK. Will you be down here later? Listen: I’m going nowhere. Still some tests to do… double-checking. They’re keeping me in. Say you will. I need the company… there’s no-one… no-one else… I…’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Her voice cracked, she bowed her head and suddenly looked once again like the girl on the stairs - lost, frightened, disconsolate. Her scraping chair heralded our parting.

‘Yes, OK. I’d really like that.’ I nodded and smiled naturally, without effort. I’d smiled a lot in the last hour or so. ‘I’ll be here. What? Seven? Eight? Later? Earlier?’

‘Eight is fine. It’s a date!’ and she laughed away her tears as she turned away, then began whistling as she walked, high heels accentuating the sway of her very tight and desirable arse. I chastised myself for looking, but couldn’t tear my eyes away. Her legs were long and the gap between them was maintained right to the very top. Perfect. The door swung closed behind her and I was left alone but for her sweet perfume and faint receding heel clicks beating time to the music she still made. She was only eighteen. Would I look at my own daughter so, have such thoughts? What if she was my daughter, say from a one-night stand, and we’d only just met? I’d read how long-lost blood relatives could be sexually aroused at reunions, despite all that science and The Bible tell us about such couplings and it had always intrigued me. But no, I wouldn’t fancy my own daughter – well, maybe for a moment or two the first time, but if I saw her every day I would not feel like that. And anyway - she wasn’t my daughter. She was someone else’s, though she’d said she had been abandoned and abused by them. She was a vulnerable girl and I just happened to be there in her moment of need. I felt all the stirrings that sexual abstinence combined with an impending death and a very sexy young woman could engender. I was heady and sweating and very, very aroused. I headed for the same door, subconsciously singing the words to accompany her whistled tune.

I sat with Danielle and the time seemed to move even more slowly than usual. A few friends visited regularly at first, but as weeks turned into months their visits got more rare and now I was all she had. She was an only child and never spoke of her parents - who I assumed were long-dead – or any surviving family, and said she just didn’t want to know. Going against all the professional advice, she left them buried somewhere in her mind. She said it was fine. What good could it do? Digging it all up could cause more problems than it solved. It was better the way it was – she felt no loss, they were strangers to her. But sometimes we would go somewhere she said she’d never been and yet she knew what was around the next corner. And once or twice in the car she said something like, ‘Short cut, turn left,’ when she couldn’t possibly have known. Now and then, a strange phrase would slip out, or she would do something so uncharacteristic that one could have thought she had