Her niece Lena says that beating yourself up for failing to reach your goals is a waste of energy; recommit or ditch the goal but no negative self-talk about what you woulda-shoulda-coulda. Lena was usually talking about her diet, which week by week seemed increasingly strict and easy to fail at: no sugar, no dairy, no gluten, no artificial sweeteners, no caffeine. If she ate something she shouldn’t, she would ask herself: is it important to me to stick to this rule? If it was, she forgave herself the mistake and promised herself she’d do better. If it wasn’t, she would decide to ditch the restriction.

Lena had never, to Nic’s knowledge, made the latter choice, but that doesn’t mean Nic can’t. To hell with changing the hallway light bulb, she decides, edging her way through the kitchen. If it worked she would only worry about forgetting to switch it off, then worry about the electricity bill being even more than it was already.

She feels immediately lighter. Lena’s been a wise old thing since she was a baby. Proven by the fact she’s always liked me more than her own mother, Nic would say if either mother or daughter were here right now. Lena would tell her not to be such a bitch, but wouldn’t mean it; Michelle would laugh, and she wouldn’t mean that either.

Nic adds the catalogues to the stack beside the microwave and the vouchers to the one on the front left hotplate. She puts today’s newspaper on the kitchen table, where it slips about for a few seconds before settling nicely. It would sit on the kitchen table until she had a chance to finish reading it, and if that hasn’t happened by bedtime she will put it with its colleagues in the hallway, waiting for a day when she has more time, better concentration.

Nic opens her handbag, sees the plastic bag within, thrills at the baby doll bonnet. The problem, though, is where to put it. It is such a new and special thing that it has no place.

The kitchen is out of the question. It’s for paperwork and food containers and recipes and medicines, for things that need processing or dealing with or eating or discarding, for life’s ephemera (a word from Lena’s vocabulary homework a decade ago and which Nic loves so much she uses at every opportunity).