Today there are four such boxes propped on the cardboard piles, two within leaning distance. Nic pulls the first out onto the dock and plunges in. Mostly advertising brochures and torn-up letters, but there are half-a-dozen envelopes. She won’t check their linings here; she is alone now but that could change any second and it would be awkward to explain why she is out here on her knees. The second reachable box is a treasure chest. Four thick, neat stacks of envelopes, apparently unused. Perhaps TPB Realty had a logo change or someone ordered the wrong size. Their stuff up is her wonderful win. She shoves greedy handfuls into her carrier bag. It’s hard not to look inside the envelopes so she can see the beauty, begin imagining the mosaic in detail, but she has to be disciplined about this, take her bounty and get out before someone comes along to ruin it all.

Walking home, arms laden with bags, the footpath reverberates up her left leg and provokes the hip which used to only bother her at night. This was how her mother walked, not quite a limp but a list to one side as though her left foot was squeamish about the floor, unwilling to fully plant itself there. Mum never climbed on a desk and took a tumble. Mum never worked in a shop on her flat feet for eight hours a day for decades on end. Mum wore high-heeled shoes and went dancing and the next day soaked her feet in balsam salts and sometimes went weeks without leaving the house and sometimes went out all day and night and came home carried in the arms of a man. When Steve died, Michelle said, What chance did he have with those doomed Miller genes? and Nic argued so hard, but here she is in her mother’s body after all.

At home she empties the carrier bag with a thrill of anticipation but it’s a dud lot. Almost transparent as soon as you lift one side of the envelope off the other. Of course, that’s why they’d been dumped in the first place. Her blood itches with the new dilemma. They will be no use at all for her mosaic, but if she discards them she’ll be as callous as those snobs at TPB Realty. They’re lovely envelopes, when you really look. Smooth, stark-white paper. Thin, yes, but sometimes that’s what you want, isn’t it? She isn’t sure, not having sent any mail for years. But now she will! Because these unassuming, abandoned little things have found their way to her and she will not let them down.