“You don’t have to look, Rae.” That hand again, gently pulling at my shoulder. I know why she doesn’t want me to. She thinks that if I see you like this, it’s who you will be to me: that this is how I will remember you. She doesn’t know about the first time when the breeze made the rope creak and your sneakers hung a hand’s width above the ground. Or the last.

I watch.

I watch as they come out, and the bag looks much bigger than you on the trolley. The smell comes out too. Lucy coughs behind me, but it’s not so bad. I watch as they wheel you into the back of the vehicle, the little legs of the trolley folding up neatly beneath you. They are gentle. They slide you in carefully and shut the doors quietly, no banging like a delivery truck. I wonder how often they do this. This collecting of other people’s people.

The man slides into the driver’s side. The woman goes around to the passenger side. She looks at me. Our gazes meet. She doesn’t smile. Neither do I. She gives me a nod and I nod back because I know what she’s saying with it.

She’s seen you. She helped you down from where you were stuck. She walked you through our house with the tidy kitchen and the key bowl on the table. She wheeled you past your neatly made bed and the towels hanging in the bathroom. She eased you headfirst out of our home. She knows a tiny piece of you. And a tiny piece of me. And she knows that’s all it is.

She gets into the van.

Someone puts the tape back across the front door.

Lucy puts a hand on my other shoulder, weighting me gently from behind.

“It’s not her in there, Rae.”

The things people say.

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, yes, it’s her body. But the her you knew, she’s not in there. She’s in your heart, in your memories. The way she was.”

I know she means well. But she doesn’t know. I know it more than she does. I know you’re not one thing. Knowing you is not one thing, it was never one thing. It’s a million things. And now the place holding them together is me.

I watch the van drive away.

And I say it because I never got to say it before. I say it because I wish I had, almost as much as I wish I didn’t have to.

“Bye, Mum.”

DAY 51

MONDAY

LUCY PUTS ME in the car and drives me somewhere, not telling me where we’re going. I sit in the car and let her drive. I don’t care.