I don’t remember leaving Harbour. I don’t remember much until one morning, weeks later, when my eyes opened with a snap and my thoughts were clear again. There was an IV in my arm and Aunt Caroline sat by the bed.

‘Thomasina?’

‘Where’s Tilly?’ My voice sounded strange – hoarse, foreign. Old.

‘We’ll talk later,’ Aunt Caroline said. Her blue eyeliner looked electric, wet with tears.

Later, we learned that Dr Bellavit would place bodies in the incinerator. They found forms that I’d signed, forms that Tilly had signed, giving Dr Bellavit our inheritance, our house, our power of attorney. You won’t get the body back, the police said. So we did the next best thing and asked to be sent the ashes from the incinerator. Tilly would like this, I thought. Being so small, so light, that she could slip into a narrow white-and-gold urn.

It was placed at the centre of Aunt Caroline’s mantelpiece. We never discussed the possibility that the ashes might be someone else, or might be no-one – only Harbour’s other refuse: burned-up coconut shells, grass clippings, swept leaves, household rubbish.

But there must be something of her in there, I thought. So one day, when I was alone in the house, I hobbled down the stairs – it still hurt to walk – and I took the urn down. My heart fluttered as I removed the stopper. I licked my fingertip and dipped it in.

I was surprised at the feel of the ashes. I had imagined them to be coarse, granular, but they were soft as flour, silken to the touch.

I tasted them again, and then a third time, before returning the stopper and putting the urn back in its place. I wondered how long it would take to digest Tilly, how long the specks of her body could sustain me. I wondered how long it would be before my body absorbed all traces of her – how long I’d have to wait to be sure she was really gone.

Monstera

It always seemed tragic to me that Ian was so much shorter than his daughters. He must have seen it coming – he must have seen their tibias and femurs getting longer and longer, seen their heads rising up to his shoulder and past it, past his chin, past his ears. By the time they were in high school, they could look down on the part in his hair. Whether or not this bothered him was hard to tell. Perhaps he was used to being a small man by then.