She slept heavily and did not dream. The next morning, she drank a cup of weak green tea; ate a dessert spoon of honey stirred into Greek yoghurt; upended the shoebox across the kitchen counter and watched its contents bounce and roll. They were just small things – ordinarily tawdry but in resonant colours – which she thought must once have belonged to Marnie. She stared at them, strewn across the counter like coloured buttons. Some of them were buttons, in different shapes and sizes. Some of them were more like old-fashioned enamel badges – emblems of someone’s miltary career, or a life in nursing or conducting buses, brought up short by pancreatitis or stroke in the early 1970s. There were things that resembled Lego bricks, made of a translucent material too substantial to be plastic; two or three pinchbeck rings with interesting symbols; a cluster of tiny porcelain rosebuds you could pin to a frock; beads, charms, iron-on tattoos, yellowing dice and a pair of moulded plastic lips at the very beginnings of a kiss. Miniature playing cards slipped from a pasteboard box. There was a plastic mug with a mirrored bottom, so that when you drank from it your own face was revealed. A little red Valentine’s heart with diodes inside that even now lit up when Anna pressed the tiny button on the back – although God knew how old it must be. They were the kinds of things that turn up in trays at flea markets. Costume jewellery fallen out of a Christmas cracker thirty years before. Anna was compelled. She phoned Marnie and they had another disagreement.

‘But do try and remember,’ Anna urged. ‘Little 3D pictures! And enamel badges like the ones you wore when you were at Cambridge.’

‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘It is five o’clock in the morning.’

‘Is it, darling?’ Anna said. ‘I thought they were just the type of thing a child might collect,’ she tried to explain. ‘I thought you’d be interested.

‘Do you know something?’ she said. ‘Some of them are warm!’

‘Hang up, Anna,’ Marnie advised. ‘I am.’