Before my 19-year-old son di3d, he donated his heart to an 18-year-old girl — after the transplant, her mother handed me a letter from my son that began, “Mom, there’s something you need to know about her.”

And the thing Lena asked me in the October, which I had been dreading since the August.

She asked whether she could see a photograph of Martin.

She is nineteen and she has never seen her father’s face. Katrin had none — she got rid of everything in 2007 — and there is nothing online, because he died before people put their whole lives there.

And I have four albums.

And I sat with them on my knee for about a week, in the evenings, before she came. Deciding.

Because there is a version of it where I give her the good ones. Him on holiday. Him at our wedding. Him holding Cian on the beach at Portrush.

And a version where I give her the truth, which is that he is in about three hundred photographs and in every single one of them he is charming.

In the end I put the albums on the table and let her turn the pages herself, and I did not say anything except who people were.