You are allowed to ask again.

There is something you have been asking for a long time. Years, some of it. The words have worn smooth with the use.

Some nights you ask properly. Most nights it is barely a sentence — a name, a situation, handed over on the way to sleep.

And nothing has moved. That is the part that quietens people. Not doubt, exactly. More a sense that you have had your go, that it was heard the first time, and that raising it again is somehow poor form.

It is not. Nothing about asking again says you did it badly before. Hannah went up year after year over the same thing, and was taken for drunk while she was at it. The oldest prayers in the book are the repeated ones.

Whatever yours is, you are allowed to bring it again tonight. The same words. No apology in front of it.