I was twenty-eight weeks with triplets and bleeding on a hotel sofa when my husband adjusted his tie and went downstairs. Four days later a man I had never met put a small black recorder on my hospital bed.

PART 2 — THE GRANT LIST

Eleven weeks before that night there was a donor dinner at a hotel out at Denholm. About twenty-five people, all of them writing cheques.

I chair the Voss Foundation. My grandfather set it up in 1979 and I have chaired it since 2019 and it gives away about two million dollars a year.

I had the grant list. Two pages, the current cycle, because three of the people at that table had given to it directly and I was going to say thank you properly.

I stood up.

And Callum came round the end of that table and took it out of my hands.

He did it smiling. He put it face down beside his own place setting and left two fingers on it.

And he said, to twenty-five people: