Sam and Laurie knelt on the floor beside me too. ‘But are you sure she won’t want these?’ Sam was saying. I leaned forward to bring blood to my head; there was so much crammed into this small space. For so long we hadn’t known what to do with her room. Change it, leave it, even my sister Lillian hadn’t been able to say, my sister who always had the answers to everything. To begin with, we’d tried to leave everything untouched, ready for her to come back to, but it was so hard to see her room like that, the toys, books, clothes a constant reminder that she wasn’t here. I think it started with the photos the police needed for the posters and news bulletins, the school portraits we’d laid out on her bed. Small changes at first, small additions. Over time though, year after year, we’d hoarded so much in here that by now it resembled an incident room: the cork board above her desk cluttered with the small, flat cards the officers had kept handing over at the end of every meeting saying, If there’s anything you need, anything else you think of, just call; the walls covered with newspaper articles about her own and other abductions that might somehow shed light; then the computer composites of how she might have looked, at nine, ten, twelve, my beautiful daughter; the boxes and boxes of posters Robert used to print up every year, all symbols of our search for her.

But I didn’t want her to be faced with all this, so much pain and desperation and loss. It was a home she needed, her family to welcome her: normality, happiness, the hurt over now.

I steadied myself with a palm against the floor and looked up at Robert, my husband, standing upright again now. ‘Please can you bring her things down from the loft?’ I asked him. All the things we’d put away up there. ‘I want her to see, I want her to have them.’ Without saying anything, without questioning me or hesitating, my husband went to unclip the loft ladder. The thought of his goodness almost closed up my throat and I had to swallow my mouth dry to make it pass. This was all we’d ever dreamed of and Robert had stood by me all the years in between, so why was I terrified that it might all change now?