I wonder if things could have been different, had I chosen another path the day the man with the dead eyes took my daughter. Summer had crept up on us that year. From the new-born buds they had been just a few days ago, fresh leaves formed a dense canopy above our heads, while the flowers erupted with bursts of riotous colours, tree sap sticky with the scent of decay. My daughter was enthralled by the scene before her, even though we walked along this route almost every day.

I removed the headset and placed it carefully on the table. For a while I sat there, unable to move. All I could do was turn over her words again and again in my head, think about all the things that I had never known about her. Why had she chosen to tell me such important things now, when there was no way I could ever reply? A feeling of resentment coursed through my veins. She should have talked to me when she was alive, face to face, instead of cowering behind a façade of a distant time. She was wrong, I told myself. I would have listened. Except, like her, I wasn't sure about how true that really was.

I stretched my stiff legs beneath the desk and yawned widely. Looking at my watch, I registered that my next break was in three years and seven months' time. Well, you couldn't have everything, I suppose.