She can’t wait any longer. Has to piss, to eat and drink and take more painkillers. She manages the first with an ease which boosts her confidence but then whacks her hip against the kitchen table, which has been pulled out from the wall for no apparent reason except to cause her both insult and injury. There is no food in the kitchen, and when she makes her way back to the empty lair Will slept in last night and checks the fridge she finds only two bottles of Fanta. She hates Fanta but bought it because it was on sale and the next time someone she knew mentioned that it was their favourite drink she would have a surprise bottle or two ready.

Her tablets, at least, are easy to locate. Sitting on the kitchen table next to her open handbag. She takes only half of what she has been prescribed. She is tired of feeling foggy and uncertain, of letting herself be helpless.

Without the children to stop her she walks through the house, using walls and furniture instead of crutches, taking in the remains. The echoes of her slippers on the floorboards conjure ghosts. Lena and Will running wildly up and down the hallway in their school uniforms, Lena as tall as her brother, Will determined to run faster to make up for it. The narrow space taking the sound of their slapping feet and broadcasting it to the rest of the house.

They are in the kitchen, too, the ghosts of her sister’s children. Summer-brown legs swinging, skinny forearms on the tabletop, sunburnt faces intent on the plates of food in front of them. Always ate like they hadn’t been fed in a year. Those children died when their daddy did, is the fact of it. What if the ones who took their places had been here instead of the ghosts? Been here all these years, running up her empty hallway, scraping plate after plate clean. In that version of reality, the house stays as it was in the years between Mum’s death and Joe’s. It is as it’s always been, a family home. Space to play, to cook, to make up beds for whoever needs them.