She remembered it so clearly. It was Christmas and she really only had days to live. It had been the sweetest and saddest Christmas of her whole life. Liv felt the familiar tears build up behind her eyes. She wiped them away, a little angrily, snapping closed the locket. It wasn’t fair. Surely, it was time to think about these things with feelings of happiness and gratitude instead of this eternal overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss.

She turned the locket over then as another memory tried hard to push itself up into her brain. The clasp was new. Pete had taken it to the jeweller’s and had it mended one afternoon while she slept across Rachel’s hospital bed. The original clasp had been weak, worn out with time and wear. Liv smiled; she’d forgotten that. She held the locket up towards the light, inspecting it with fresh eyes. Pete. He’d managed to find a jeweller who made the new clasp perfectly to sit into the locket; you’d never guess that it had been replaced.

And the chain. Another little voice was nudging past her tears, as if trying to unsettle her ability to wallow for too long. Yes. Pete had replaced the chain. It had snapped when they were at a gig – she’d never know how he managed to spot it. But he picked up the locket from the floor where it had fallen from her neck. This was a good six months after Rachel had passed away. They’d gotten tickets that neither of them wanted to use, but in the end, he’d convinced her. It was Rachel’s favourite band. They’d spent the following day trailing around Dublin jewellers to find the perfect replacement chain. Pete had insisted on buying it for her. Liv found herself smiling.

This might have been Rachel’s locket, her sister’s gift to her, but there was no doubt that Pete had been the one to hold it together. She drew her breath in sharply, feeling for a moment as if Rachel herself had whispered something in her ear, but she was much too far away for her to hear her words distinctly.

It was almost two o’clock in the morning by the time she’d emptied everything from the bedroom and hoovered and scrubbed all trace of Eddie from this space.

Even if the rest of the flat still felt like a collision of the past and an uncertain future, at least, Liv thought, she could fall into bed and feel as if the world was somehow tipping over into its rightful place again.