I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

My mother rang me at the end of a fourteen-hour day.

She said: your daughter has wasted the eighteen hundred that was meant for a laptop, and now she’s running about with some boy who doesn’t even go to school. If you don’t come and sort her out, I’m finished with her.

My name is Desmond Falk.

Five years ago my wife passed. The bills from that had taken nearly everything we had, and I took a job managing projects out of state because it was the only way back onto solid ground.

Talise was ten. I left her with my mother in Hallowbridge.

Every month I sent money. Food, clothes, school things, transport, anything medical. And a separate amount on top that was supposed to cover fees, tutoring, and whatever came up.

Sixty transfers. I have never missed one, not in the month I had shingles and not in the month I did not get paid on time and borrowed it.

And every month my mother had something new for me.

Talise is spending too much. She’s got lazy. She wants labels now. She’s out on the streets. She knows you’re far away and she is taking advantage of it.

And I believed all of it.