First, though, she made a careful lap of the entire place. Though lap was the wrong word. There was a zigzag, barely there path running from the lounge room to the hall. From that relatively clear space she opened the door to the spare room and her stomach filled with cement. When she’d visited Lou the first time she’d been astounded to realise that Lou’s bedroom had always been that. The bed was the one Lou had slept in since her early teens, when it replaced the one she had slept in since she was a toddler, which had replaced her cot. The pale cream walls with butter yellow trim used to be pink with purple trim after they were cream with pink trim, but they were the same walls. The antique hardwood dresser had been there since before Lou was born, handed down to her parents to place there in anticipation of the daughter they knew would come. Lou moved to the overstuffed armchair by the window at a certain time in the afternoon because she knew the winter sunshine would warm her there, just as it always had. There was a photo in the hallway just outside the room of Lou aged maybe six or seven sitting in the exact chair she sat on talking to Lena, with what appeared to be the same shaft of sunlight bouncing off her shoulder. It seemed, to Lena, like time travel.

Lena had never had a room of her own for more than a year or two at a time. Even then, those rooms were never really hers, as she was reminded whenever she wanted to change the colour of the walls or stick posters on them. If you mark the walls they’ll take it out of our bond, Mum’d chant.

This room at Aunty Nic’s was one she woke in from age three to thirteen. Not every morning or anywhere near that, but at some point, at many points, in each of those years it was this grey popcorn ceiling she saw when she opened her eyes, this tan loop-pile carpet her cold morning toes pressed into, this mirror-fronted built-in wardrobe she checked for monsters then ghosts then serial killers before sliding the doors closed and climbing into this bed. And now … now, goddamn it, this room was just another warehouse for Nic’s shit. The hope—one she hadn’t known she held until this moment—that she might crawl into the creaky old bed tonight, curl up and watch the headlights of passing cars dance across the wall until sleep swamped her, was smashed. She kicked the bag of clothes nearest to her foot; it shuddered but remained in place, held tight by the boxes, bags, baskets surrounding it.