All the way down, Jess contemplates finding her mum, telling her where Lily has been, what she thinks has taken place inside that bedroom. But by the time she reaches the bottom stair, Jess knows she cannot. To tell her mum would be to voice suspicions Jess is not yet ready to assert, things she does not, at the age of ten, have the courage to say out loud.

Instead, she picks up her schoolbag and exits the front door, unsure whether it is the summer heat or Lily’s breath she can feel prickling the skin on the back of her neck. She does not yet know it, but by the time she gets home this afternoon, the fabric of her family will have been altered irrevocably, and the morning’s events will repeat in her mind like a record stuck under the groove of a needle for the next thirty years.

Part One

February 2016

Chapter 1

Audrey

Audrey Siskin sat on the bed, palms flat beside her on the duvet, arms locked, as if unsure whether she was coming or going, and cast her eyes around the room she was being encouraged to think of as her own. Familiar objects stood forlornly and ill at ease, like children in a classroom on the first day of school. There was the wrought-iron double bedstead that had served all the years of her marriage and beyond; the white-painted dressing table she’d dreamed of as a child but hadn’t been able to afford until adulthood; the tall oak wardrobe she and Edward had bought when they’d first moved into the house in Barnsbury Square, newly married and five months pregnant.

Leaning forward, Audrey ripped at the packing tape on one of the two dozen cardboard boxes stacked up around the room but couldn’t bring herself to flip open the lid. Once she’d unpacked, that was it: there was no going back.

It’s not far, Mum. Only a few miles. Things won’t be that different at all.

Both her daughters had said it, separately but equally persuasively. And technically—geographically—both Lily and Jess were right. It was barely seven miles, less as the crow flew. A simple exchange of north London for west. Islington for Shepherd’s Bush. Georgian for Victorian. And yet to Audrey it felt as though she’d swapped the Earth for the moon.

She knew how lucky she was, having two daughters vying for her to move in with them, knew that it was better to make the move now rather than in a year’s time when she would likely find it even more difficult. But Audrey still couldn’t help feeling that it was all wrong. Children shouldn’t become responsible for their parents: it upset the natural order of things. But then, Audrey thought, images spooling through her mind of all the events she’d forget if forgetting were an option, so many episodes in her life had upset the natural order. So many of the defining moments—births, deaths, marriages—were not how they should have been had the world spun faithfully on its axis without ever tilting a few degrees out of kilter.