As she lies here closer to the bag and box than she has been in years, she remembers that they once caused only shallow surface cuts when she’d glimpse them as she moved around sleeping bags and pillows, board games and tape recorders, all the things kids needed for sleepover fun.

Something happened. Something terrible.

She remembers pulling down Lena’s sleeping bag, knowing it was the last sleepover before her mother took her to Brisbane. And that made her sad, of course, but it wasn’t the thing she had forgotten. The thing that happened.

It hurts hurts hurts but it’s important.

Something happened here, to do with the bag and the box.

Her blood itches and she sees her boy, her Will, heading off to court in the suit he wore to his dad’s funeral, his hair cut too short, showing the prickly heat rash on the back of his neck.

She didn’t see him after that and it was months along, that last sleepover with Lena, pulling down the sleeping bag and seeing the space it left on the shelf and a thought slammed into her: I can put Will’s stuff alongside Daddy’s and Steve’s.

Treacherous mind, killing off her nephew when he was alive, if not necessarily well, fifteen kilometres away in Silverwater. Treacherous space provoking her to imagine it filled in that way. Imagine the things that might happen to him in prison. The things that might happen to him if he made it out and had to live in the world with an unscrubbable stain on his life.

It had been a moment and it passed and the shelf filled with other things. Soft and kind and sweet things. The box and bag surrounded by so much goodness there is no room for anything else. It is a good place now. Safe.

It is important to acknowledge gratitude in even the hardest times, Mum used to say, having learnt it from Oprah. Here is what Nic is grateful for, lying alone in the dark on her childhood single bed in significant physical and psychological pain: the room in which she kept the most important things—painful and lovely both—is the room the children left alone. They had tried to erase her life but here she was embedded in the best of it, more in touch with its aching, profound, important beauty than she had been for years.

WILL

WILL