"Not much of it's very useful, here," she says, a sparse smile prompted by that surprise - Gwenaëlle knows what she is. Knows how what happens behind closed doors does not always match so well to the pretty portrait of what happens outside them. "But I know about dying. My mother was doing it slowly my whole life."

And then, eventually, she finished.

"I thought - that there should be someone here he hasn't got to comfort." Someone who knows about burying her own grief deep and holding someone else's hand, putting all of the messy parts of a moment in a puzzle box and keeping it closed for as long as it needs to be. It hurts, it's tiring, it is a sort of labour that cannot be indefinitely maintained without release -

but it's necessary, sometimes. Gwenaëlle knows.