She thought about her mum, just a few minutes earlier, sitting on the sofa holding her hand, and suddenly found herself imagining the gaping absence her death would leave behind. It was as though something was pressing down hard on her windpipe: an assault, a compression, panic inhaled with each breath. She was forty-three years old, she told herself. She must have known this day would come eventually, that there would likely be years – decades – when she would be alive and her mum would not. She knew that most children, at some point, became orphans.
