She scrolled down her older pics. Every photo of herself looked provocative, lips wet and pouting, cleavage showing. She started deleting them one by one; stopped, went to settings, deleted her account.

If only you could delete your whole life, start a fresh one, pseudonymous and with locked-down privacy settings. She heard Mum’s voice in her head: Careful what you wish for. Because she had asked for her life to be deleted, once. She’d been fourteen, still reeling from losing her dad to cancer, and then Mum tells her that Will didn’t get a warning like she’d promised. He was going to jail. Like actual adult jail even though he was barely eighteen and sweet and kind. And it just felt unbearable. That she would lose him as well as Dad and that she’d have to go back to school, where everyone was already looking at her funny because her dad was dead, and would now look at her like an absolute loser freak because her brother was a crim. She had begged to be allowed to change schools, somewhere far enough away that nobody would know about her. She hadn’t imagined Mum’d take her to a whole other state.

It had been better, though. Not good, especially since they had to live with Mum’s obscenely fast rebound husband, but better. As Mum explained to Aunty Nic, Lena needed a chance to meet people for the first time without them already thinking they knew her. I want her to be seen for who she is in her own right, not just the girl with a dead brother and father in jail. And Lena, who had been eavesdropping from the kitchen, couldn’t help it, had to shout a correction: My father is not in jail! My brother is not dead! And it was years before she understood that Mum had been talking about herself and Nic: their dad, their brother. They knew what it was to have someone else’s reputation precede you.

This was generational progress, then. Well done, Lena. First in the family to go to uni, first daughter and sister to fuck up her reputation all on her own.

NIC

NIC

Time is a closed circle. What was that? Something Lena had told her, a line from a book or maybe a TV show, one of those streaming ones that was as entertaining to watch, and took as much concentration, as the business segment of the news, which Nic sat through on her lazier nights because she had lost her remote control and it was only ten minutes to get through between the end of the proper news and the next program.