Jim hadn’t been working in the funeral business when she met him, he was a young lad himself, carefree and enjoying life, only to get sucked into working with the dead after his father had died. But he hadn’t resented it, had found his calling, and so had Dorothy, although she wondered about that now. She’d allowed her life to be subsumed by her husband’s. Such a common story for her generation, but what do you do once that’s gone? Disconnected from Jim’s influence and with everything she was discovering, she wondered whether she was ever cut out for this in the first place. What if she’d got together with Isaac instead, who now worked as a movie producer, or Adrian who retired recently from his hotshot legal firm. Or if she hadn’t allowed Jim to talk her back to Scotland, if she’d stayed in a duplex in Pismo Beach with divorced Lenny, surfing in the mornings and barbecues in the evenings. There were an infinite number of pathways your life could take. How do any of us really know what to do with our lives? And how, after seventy years, do we know whether it was all a waste of time?

She looked at Erin’s face, framed by the body bag. How little time we have. These were the hardest ones, teenagers and kids, the death of potential, the death of possibility. Erin was younger than Hannah, would never go to university or get a job, never find a husband or wife or go travelling or sleep with a hundred men or women, she would never just sit in a quiet room with a book, staring at the sunlight coming through the window for a moment and realise how lucky she was to be alive.

Dorothy swallowed hard and zipped up the body bag just as her phone rang. She pulled it out. Thomas, the DNA results.

‘Hi,’ she said, her voice catching.

‘Hello Dorothy, I tried calling Jenny first but she didn’t answer.’

‘Jenny?’ Dorothy was confused. ‘What’s this about?’164

Thomas cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid I have Hannah here, she’s being detained on possible assault charges.’

Dorothy put a hand out to steady herself and touched the chilled arm of Erin Underwood through the body bag, so thin it felt like a twig ready to snap.

She paced around the reception of St Leonard’s Police Station feeling Jim’s bone in her cardigan pocket, pushing her thumb against the point like it was a tattooing tool. She imagined inking her body with elaborate Maori shapes and curls, testaments to ancestors, a link to the dead. But what if your dead didn’t deserve their stories told, what if they were disgraceful?

The door to the business part of the station swung open and Thomas held it with a spread palm as Hannah ducked out.