That same afternoon, Holly was taking a lunch break while Rachel kept an eye on the shop for half an hour, when their mother came through the back door of the flat with something large and bulky in her hands. As she waved off Holly’s offer of help, she headed into the living room and placed the object, which was a little dusty, on Holly’s coffee table in front of the sofa.

‘Your dad and I were having a bit of a clear-out of the eaves cupboards, and we thought you might like to have this.’ She gestured to the coffee table. ‘We took a quick look inside and it seemed to be most of your university stuff.’

Holly laughed as she flipped the catches on the old-fashioned blue suitcase. ‘I hope you didn’t find anything too incriminating in there!’ The suitcase smelt a little musty from well over a decade in her parents’ attic cupboards, but as she turned it over and flipped the rusting silver catches, opening the lid, she gasped. There, inside the case, was the contents of her university bedroom, complete with essays, posters and even the old college handbook from her first year.

‘Bloody hell,’ Holly said. ‘I had no idea you’d kept this stuff.’ Pulling out a blue cardboard document wallet, she scanned through one of her English Literature essays and shuddered. ‘I can’t believe I ever got my degree with work like this.’ Holly had graduated with a more than respectable upper second-class honours degree in English and Politics from the University of York, and as she riffled through the papers and pictures that were still neatly packed into folders and envelopes after thirteen years in her parents’ attic, she was assailed by memories of people, places and experiences she’d not thought about in years. Alongside the posters of classic films – Star Wars, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Bladerunner, was a copy of the college handbook, a programme from a play she’d acted in during her first year and a stack of photocopied journal articles on the Romantic poets.

As she opened a large, manila envelope, an equally large stack of photographs was revealed. Some of the snaps took her back instantly; the photograph of her dearest friends from university, taken after they’d laughed themselves weak watching an episode of Desperate Housewives late one night while drinking sangria mixed in a storage box from The Works, reawakened a lot of good memories. Pictures of a couple of boyfriends from uni evoked some slightly different feelings.