I married a seventy-year-old hospice patient so she could know what it felt like to be a bride. After the funeral her solicitor took me aside and said: she didn’t choose you by accident.

And he said: she was paying me to be the person who did not ask.

Then he said something else, which is the most useful sentence anybody has given me about any of this.

He said: there are people who only know how to be close to somebody through a piece of paper. She was one. I am another. You are not, which is why she chose you and not me.

And in four years I have never once let anybody know who I am.

Not because I am humble. I am not remotely humble; I posted a photograph of a dying woman at twenty past eight on a Tuesday.

I do it that way because she did, and because I have come to understand that the anonymity was never about modesty for her either.

It was so she never had to find out what those women thought of her.

I am doing the same thing. I am just doing it on purpose now.

Her family and I have spoken. Three times, and the third one was better than the first two.

They have their own account of 1981 and it does not match hers in several places and I have decided that is allowed.

Her niece did most of the talking. She is fifty-four and she was born after Wilhelmina left, so she has never met her at all.

And the thing she said that I was not prepared for was this.

She said: we looked. For about fifteen years. My grandmother had somebody looking.

There is a version of this story where a family cuts a woman off, and there is a version where a woman goes and cannot be found, and both families always believe the first one.

Wilhelmina thought nobody came after her.

Somebody came after her for fifteen years and did not find her, because she was extremely good at not being findable, because she had been practising since she was twenty-six.

I have not been able to decide whether I am glad she never knew that. Most days I am.

The photograph is still up. I have thought about taking it down about forty times.

It stays because a woman waited eleven weeks for a Thursday to get it taken.

And because of one thing her niece said at the end of the third conversation, when we had both stopped being careful.

She asked to see it. Not on a phone — printed.