There was this girl I knew called Sarah. For a while – when I was younger – we hung out together almost all the time. She was funny and happy and her voice went croaky when she was excited. The things I most remember about her are singing stupid songs that she’d made up and threading daisy chains and lying on our backs on a high, grassy hill talking about clouds. The things I want to remember. We argued as well, though. I don’t want to remember her shouting at me, or the time I told her I hated her and she cried, but I do. The truth is that I loved her more than anything. But she died before I ever really knew her: she was twenty-six. She was my mother.