Before he’d woken properly, still cocooned in blankets on the lounge, pressing his tongue to his tooth, wondering if Mercy was awake and if she was thinking, as he was, of the way they were together in the early mornings, half asleep and warm and seemingly unable to get close enough to each other, wondering this while a tiny raw part of him did what it always did in the moments after waking and waited with a deep, sick sense of disbelief for the rise-and-muster bell. Still in this state of pain and longing and dread, but on the far edge of it, beginning to think of shaking off the night and the dawn and sitting up, a weight fell on his feet and with it the sound of his little sister sobbing.

‘Leen? What? What’s happened?’

She was a scrunched-up, quivering ball at the far end of the sofa. He couldn’t move his feet without disturbing her, but he couldn’t do much without moving them. She let herself be rocked and dropped, didn’t let up on the sobbing.

Her phone was clutched tightly in her left hand, as per usual, but there was something else in her right hand. A moment of disorientation. Back in time, yes, but also space. This object that still existed but in a place it had never been. Will reached for it, was surprised at the tenacity with which she held on and then the suddenness with which she let go. It fell hard onto her thigh. Will grabbed it, turned it over in his hand. Dad’s vice grips.

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where?’

‘In her wardrobe. Box up the back. All of his stuff’s there. His tools. I didn’t know at first. That they were his. But once I saw that …’

Will ran his hands over the initials engraved on the underside of one arm. The rest of the metal was so scarred you wouldn’t know the letters were there, unless they’d been pointed out to you, proudly, by the man who’d carved them. First tool Dad’d bought with his own money. The stuff in his bucket before then had been handed down or loaned to him by older mates. But he’d taken his first pay envelope straight down the hardware and, though he’d thought about getting cheap versions of half-a-dozen tools, when he laid eyes on the shiny red-handled vice grips he changed his mind instantly. Had to have them. Over the years he’d lost them many a time, he told the kids, but they always found their way back to him. It’s how he knew it was the right decision; they were made for each other.

‘How come Aunty Nic … ?’