PART 1
The agent said it loudly enough for four rows to hear.
Sir, we need you and your daughter to move to the back of the aircraft.
Not would you mind. Not I’m sorry to ask. He was not being cruel; he was being efficient, and efficiency said this row first.
My daughter looked up at me.
She is seven years old and her name is Posy and she had been awake since four that morning because of how excited she was.
She said: Daddy, I thought these were our special seats.
That landed considerably harder than the seats did.
Special seats. That is what we had been calling them since about the April. In the car, at breakfast, in a shop. Four months of a seven-year-old saying that phrase with her whole chest.
My name is Dashiell Rooke. I am forty-one years old.
I am a widower and a single father.
I came back from my last deployment missing most of my left leg below the knee, which happened in 2014 and which is not the interesting part of this and never has been.
I do not talk about any of it.
Not at the school gate, not at work, not to the four people who would actually like me to.
To most people I am simply the tired man with a cane trying to keep up with a seven-year-old who still asks, about once a fortnight, whether her mother can see her from up there.
That morning we were flying to the coast.
It was not a holiday.
We were going back to a beach.
The one where my wife and I met, in the August of 2011, about four hundred yards from a car park with a broken barrier.
I was twenty-six. She was twenty-four. Neither of us had any money at all and we ate chips out of paper for four days and I have never been happier before or since.
Before she went, two years ago, she asked me for one thing.
Take Posy back there one day.
