Dear Carletta,

Thanks for your note expressing your eternal gratitude for the framed Polaroid of Elinor, Jack, you and I, depicting us apparently happy on our fifth wedding anniversary, and at a time close to your mother and stepfather’s twentieth.

At the very start of this reply to your note of thanks, I want to make it perfectly clear to you that my gift of the framed photograph was not intended to give you any false hope at all that we’d ever get back together. No, quite the reverse, which is why I’m addressing you by your stage name, Carletta, which you took when your singing career took off as soon as you left me.

You’re wrong in assuming that I kept the photo, of the four of us laughing and embracing in celebration of the love we once shared so long ago, for some sort of sentimental reasons.

The photograph was found in a skip. Not by me, of course, as I was well out of the picture by then, but found by Jack and he kept it until he passed away.

Your stepfather had that tiny Polaroid print encased in that magnificent silver frame, and left it to me years ago in his Will. He found the print when you emptied out our old flat before moving to Las Vegas with the new man in your life, remember your first agent Julius? Jack asked me to keep the photograph in his memory, the only member of your family that bothered to keep in touch with me (through a card and letter each Christmas).