She slips off her shoes, steps through the small dining room and pushes at the door to the living room. Her mum, sitting in a chair by the window, peers up at her from above her reading glasses. ‘Oh, it’s you.’

The phrase, and the dismissive tone of her mother’s voice, act like a time machine. In a blink Fran’s twenty again, home from university for the summer, and her eight-year-old sister is sitting on the floor cross legged, watching TV. As Fran hovers in the doorway Jenna looks up, an expression of studied indifference on her face and, mimicking her mother, says, ‘Oh, it’s you.’

Fran tries to push the memory away but her sister is everywhere she looks – on the mantlepiece, the window sills, and propped up in front of the hearth. Her mother used to say ‘too many family photographs are uncouth’, but the room has become a shrine to Jenna’s smiling face. Fran looks back at her mother, almost swallowed up in the large, plush armchair. She’s a small, slight woman; physically, at least.

‘We did agree that I’d visit at 10.30 a.m.,’ Fran says, touching her watch. ‘And it’s 10.32.’

‘Always the pedant.’

Fran hears the soft shuffle of slippers on carpet behind her and turns to see her father Henry entering the room. In her mind he’s forever in his forties, a towering man with thick dark hair and a booming voice, and it always comes as a shock seeing how old age and infirmity have curled him into himself, stealing not just his height and his hair but his spirit too. Initially, after his stroke two and a half years earlier, he was determined to regain his mobility and mind. He learned to walk again but, when he realised he’d never regain the use of his left arm, he fell into a deep depression. He withdrew into himself, refusing to go on the holidays Geraldine had dreamt of filling their retirement with, and made excuses not to leave the house or see friends. He became monosyllabic and sullen, a shadow of the man he’d once been. As his presence in the house diminished, Geraldine’s grew larger and all the resentment, bitterness and anger she’d been smothering for years would come bursting out whenever she had a visitor. Any hope that Henry would recover – emotionally or physically – was extinguished when Jenna disappeared, and Fran barely recognises the man standing in the doorway, a cane clutched tightly in his right hand.

‘Fran.’ He nods, acknowledging her presence, then slowly, painfully, shambles across the living room to the sofa and sits down.

‘How are you doing, Dad?’

‘Same as always. Nothing changes.’

Her mother slams her book shut and stands up. ‘I suppose you’d like a cup of tea, Frances.’

Fran raises an eyebrow in her dad’s direction then follows her mother into the kitchen.