She reaches up and wipes away the moisture from the window with her hand. She raises her head too until she can peer over the edge of the window. The grassy verge sparkles with dew. She presses her forehead to the cold window, her lips and nose touching the plastic of the door. She can see her hairline in the wing mirror. She lifts her head farther, craning her neck. She can see her eye.

Aaron stirs and blinks, and Rose moves sharply, released.

They step out of the car. They stretch, stiff. Their bodies are lean and chill easily in the raw air. Rose smiles at the dirt on Aaron’s face. She looks in the wing mirror properly now. Her face is grey, her hair wild, her eyes bright with hunger.

She looks back at Aaron and laughs. He grins delightedly.

A shiver runs up her back. It touches her spine delicately, sharply, and as she tries to throw it from her with a movement of her shoulders, she knows that in seconds she will be undone. The heat of love is bright and painful, and she cannot bear it.

But then Aaron steps in to her, and she squeezes him in a fierce hug, and she presses her nose into the sour skin of his neck.

Sunday. They drive again, following the winding roads.

The landscape is gentler here. The roads wind between high hedges. Rose drives slowly. Cars come fast, and you have to creep past each other, twigs rattling against the side of the car. They pass through a village.

‘The stone is a different colour,’ says Aaron.

The stone is yellow. It seems the wrong colour for stone.

The church looks wrong too. And the fence.

They pass through.

‘Do you remember the first house,’ Rose says.

Aaron nods.

‘You were only three.’

‘You told me.’

‘But do you remember?’

He shakes his head. ‘But you told me about the wallpaper.’

The roads here twist, warren-like. The car tunnels through the landscape. At another town they pull up beside a bus stop. An old lady sits with a bag on wheels and a stick.

She seems unaware of them. She looks to one side, to where the bus will come from. Her face is ruckled and blinking.

‘Excuse me,’ says Rose quietly.

The old lady stares resolutely towards the bus that hasn’t come.

Rose puts the car into gear and moves off.

The car windows are open. The air is cold. Rose wishes Aaron would remember. That was the house where they had a sofa, before her nan died. She remembers sitting on the stairs, looking at the diamond-patterned wallpaper, the sun passing through the small window in the front door and laying a different diamond, bright and warm, across the pattern. She thinks she remembers it. But she also remembers quiet nights on those same stairs, the door frame empty, the dark, the damp cold air and Dillon beside her.