This boy was my Joe, but different. Now, for the first time, I understood why Lucas had been so jealous, why Joe had been a golden boy. There was a life force about him that my Joe didn’t have. I adored my Joe, but I saw now that he was a shadow of his living self. In one of the photos he was grinning into the camera, squinting into the sun, and everything about his hair and his skin and his smile was so young. So alive. I blinked hard, and then decided it was OK to cry.

This Joe had been golden, but he hadn’t been kind to Lucas. I thought that I liked my Joe better, which was a headfuck.

Another was a class picture. I saw Joe straight away, in the middle of the front row, sitting next to a boy who had to be Troy because he was very tall with bright red hair.

And then I realized I’d seen Troy before.

Troy was looking at Joe, and Joe was giving the camera a cheesy grin and a thumbs up. I looked for Lucas and found him in the back row, frowning.

Troy had been the boy in the playground. He had written HELP ME on the wall with a stone.

‘Wow,’ I said.

Izzy was peering over my shoulder. ‘Joe is gorgeous,’ she said. ‘He kind of looks like Robert Pattinson.’

I ignored that.

‘There must be something we can do.’ We looked at each other, and Izzy’s unconditional support made me cry properly. I didn’t care if I looked stupid.

‘Right?’ said Lucas, and he was blinking hard too. ‘Look, give me your email and I’ll send these over. You’re welcome to use them. And, again, I’m glad you’re doing this. It means a lot, to know that the next generation remembers. It’s the only thing we can do now. Give my best to Gus and the family. Is it true that his dad married Mrs Dupont?’

‘It is! And she’s still at the school. She’s our French teacher. Ms Duke. It took me a while to piece that together, but we think she changed her name back to Duke when she got divorced from Dupont, and then just kept it when she married Jasper Simpson.’

‘No way!’ He looked delighted. ‘That’s so surreal. I know the school changed its name and all that, but it’s good to know that some things are the same. She was one of the good ones.’

I wrote down my email for Lucas, aware, as I did it, that it was odd for a teenage girl to start an email correspondence with an older man. I could see that he felt it too.