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.

‘I remember breaking the house,’ says Aaron.

He has a dreamy expression.

‘That was amazing.’

The road unspools in front of her, between endless hedges. Yes, it was. The day they did it was amazing. Their mother took them at night. She was ten and Aaron was seven. Their mother had seen the door was broken. When they went in, Rose thought they were going to stay. The house had been empty since they left. Their crockery was still in the cupboards, and their list of important numbers was still taped to the inside of the cutlery drawer. The people who’d broken in had left drifts of cider bottles. Their mother looked around. Then she handed Rose a plate, and Aaron a plate, and she took one herself.

‘Ready?’ she said.