After Aidan had died, life in Falmouth had become unbearable. How could she have stayed? Heartache had sent her away as soon as possible, and she’d gone to Bristol to take a business degree (eventually) and build a new life. She had returned to Cornwall for occasional weekends and at Christmas to see her dad and Gail, but steadfastly avoided the old haunts from her teenage years as too painful to revisit.

It had come as a surprise, then, to return to Marco’s Café with Lorna and Roy yesterday and not feel the maelstrom of anguish she’d expected. Sure, it had been an emotional occasion and they’d all been thinking about Aidan, but the physical space, the actual being there, hadn’t bothered Olivia at all. In fact there had been something surprisingly nice about going back. So many good memories of the place had flashed through her head, like a slideshow: the rainy afternoons she’d spent with Aidan and their friends, leaning against him in one of her black mohair jumpers with the sleeves pulled up over her hands on winter days, leafing through the music papers and talking about all the important topics of the hour – the new bands on the scene, the play someone was acting in, hair dye, politics, becoming vegetarian . . . And there had been the laughter too. The feeling that she belonged in a gang. She had forgotten all of those nice things, she realized.

As a child, her favourite toy had been a wooden marble run that once belonged to her dad: blocks that you built into towers, with chutes and runways attached with hooks to form a course for the racing marbles to whizz down. Sometimes you’d set your marbles rolling – her favourite was one with a pistachio-green twist in the middle, like an unblinking cat’s eye – only for them to come to a premature halt, clicking together like a string of beads at a badly positioned link. You’d have to go back and reset the piece, pushing it more firmly into its hook so that the path was smooth.

It had occurred to her last night, moments before she slipped into blissful deep slumber, that maybe you could do this with life too – go back and sort out the obstacle. Reset the course. Maybe while she was here she could revisit some of her other special teenage places. Turn the trip into . . . not a pilgrimage, as such, but certainly something respectful and meaningful. A small, private tour that said, I remember you. I remember us, I remember life here, for better or worse. There might be some comfort to be had from walking in her own steps once more, twenty years on, and seeing things anew through adult eyes. Perhaps she could even lay a few ghosts to rest as well.