“Granny, how are you getting on? Do you need a hand with anything?”

Mia’s voice drifted up the stairs and into the bedroom which had, until today, been hers. She would now be sleeping in the small bedroom on the top floor that had once been the attic. There was concern in her granddaughter’s voice that had tried to reshape itself into something approaching normality.

“No thanks, darling. I’m just going to make a start on these boxes. I’ll be down soon.” Audrey pushed herself to her feet, the mattress springs creaking in sympathy. Looking around her new bedroom, she didn’t know quite where to start. She’d organized the move in such a daze that she wasn’t sure what she’d thrown out and what she’d kept or what she might find.

Ripping the tape off another cardboard box and pulling back the lid, she was greeted by a pile of carefully wrapped objects, neatly stacked. Unwrapping the first, she found a framed photograph, the color slightly faded. As she stared at the picture she was aware of the sands of time slipping back through the hourglass.

Her girls on a beach—Woolacombe Bay, was it?—running along the shore, their arms and legs out of focus where their limbs had swept too swiftly across the frame for the shutter speed to capture them. The sun high in a cloudless sky, indigo sea greeting the horizon, the small white triangle of a boat’s sail visible in the distance. Her girls: holding hands, laughing, a shaft of light flaring across the frame to bathe them in an ethereal glow.

Audrey ran her fingers across the glass, over plaited hair, tanned limbs, and sun-kissed cheeks, and could almost feel the heat of that summer’s day. She could hear the sound of her daughters’ laughter, the waves undulating against the sand, the gulls calling across the sky. She could smell the salt on the breeze, feel the sand between her toes, taste her daughters’ joy. She longed to stretch her arms into the photograph, wrap them around her children’s shoulders, pull them close and never let them go.

Audrey gripped the photograph, her heart twisting beneath her ribs.

Sometimes, nowadays, only photographs reassured her that she hadn’t made it all up, that it wasn’t just a fantasy. That once upon a time her daughters had been friends.

She breathed slowly as she thought about all the years that had been lost. Even now it still seemed unreal to her that it had been almost three decades since Jess had turned against Lily. Audrey could picture Jess now, at ten years old, face hardened almost overnight by things no child should ever have to experience, as if those events had stolen Audrey’s little girl and replaced her with a child she barely recognized. For months afterward, Audrey had hoped it was shock that had changed Jess’s behavior, that soon she would revert to the happy little girl she had been before. She had spent years clinging to the belief that the events of their childhood would eventually bring Lily and Jess back together. Instead, they had torn Audrey’s family apart.