Next on her little tour was their old sixth-form college, out towards Kergilliack; really the first place where she had felt it was okay to be herself, after years of doubt. Secondary school had been an anxious period for her; she’d felt weighted down with the confusion and self-prescribed guilt of her mum having vanished, and had not felt able to care about making friends or studying or trying to get into any school teams. But at college it was as if her time had finally come – she had clicked with a few people in her classes: Nina, Beth and Spencer; she enjoyed the subjects she had chosen to study, and had discovered the excellent trinity of loud music, black eyeliner and crimped hair, assembling a whole new identity for herself. The world began to open up beyond the estate where she lived, to reveal bright and exciting horizons. All of a sudden she had started feeling upbeat about what the future might hold.

She walked around the buildings now, trying to orient herself, almost able to smell the chips from the cafeteria, the patchouli oil she and her friends had sprinkled on their hair, feeling the ghostly memory of a rucksack of library books on Tsarist and Communist Russia thumping weightily against her back. If her home life had left her feeling lost, it was here that she had found herself again.

Aidan had enjoyed sixth form too; maths and physics were his favourite subjects and he dreamed of being an engineer, leaving a legacy of beautiful constructions around the world. He could talk at length and with great enthusiasm about hydraulics and suspension, the beauty of geodesic domes, the science of pendulums, his hands flying around as he described and explained. Picturing his animated face made her smile now, but she was wistful too, because it had been from a time when they were so mad about each other, so completely entwined. Before she had been the one to oscillate like a pendulum herself, in fact, swinging uncertainly between Aidan and Pete Westgate, the guy in her history class with the brownest eyes she had ever seen.

One thing at a time, she begged her memory as it began peeling open the part of the story she most would have liked to remain closed. Don’t start getting ahead of yourself.

She gave the college one last appreciative look, her hand on the gate. ‘We were happy here, weren’t we?’ she murmured. ‘Before it all went wrong.’

And then she went back to her car and drove away. Keep it together, she said under her breath.