Emily sat up and pushed the quilt away. Climbing onto the chest of drawers, Emily stretched up to grasp hold of the battered yellow suitcase, tossed it onto the bed, and opened it wide to discover a porcelain figure of a pelican. The very end of its beak was missing, but its eyes were still painted bright blue.

“Hello,” she whispered to the bird, running her finger over the three holes in its head as she wandered back downstairs, the suitcase held tightly in one hand.

Tyler sat at the kitchen table, scrolling through his phone. He stood up as she entered the room, upending his chair, and the resounding crash bounced around the silence that hung between them.

“Changed your mind?” He gestured at the suitcase.

Emily shook her head as she dropped it by the fridge, then reached up to take another porcelain bird down from the shelf next to the sink. This pelican had just one hole in its head and thin little eyelashes surrounding its blue eyes. Emily stood the pair together on the window ledge, beak to beak, and tried to remember where they had come from.

“Hoopla,” Tyler said as he picked up the fallen chair, placed his dirty plate in the sink, and looked at the salt-and-pepper-pot birds.

“’Oopla?” Emily replied, clenching her jaw in irritation at the lost consonant.

“Don’t you remember? The fair on the Common?” Tyler turned on the tap, squeezed some washing-up liquid into the sink, and swirled his hand through the growing mountain of bubbles.

We went every year, Emily thought, watching tiny rainbows appear in each perfect sphere, and pretended not to notice how comfortable Tyler was in her presence, how easily he had slotted himself into her day. It was like some sort of bad joke, her past appearing out of nowhere and carrying on as if nothing had happened over the intervening years.

“It was the one thing I could beat you at,” Tyler said as he flicked bubbles at her and she turned away so he wouldn’t see her blush. “Your aim was terrible.”

But Tyler had given her the prize anyway, handing the birds over with a deep bow, then lifting his head to reveal a wide grin as she stomped her foot and pretended to be mad.

It was the same every year, the fairground that seemed to appear overnight, with bumper cars, candy floss, and row upon row of stalls with brightly colored lights, enticing you in, asking you to try your luck and win a prize.

The birds had been carried home in the pocket of her pinafore dress, each step bringing with it a corresponding ting of china that made her stop every so often to check neither of them was broken. Salt and pepper pots that stood proudly on the kitchen table of a house that once was her home, used every time she and her parents sat down for tea. Emily’s mother would tell her husband off for covering his food with pepper before he’d even taken a mouthful. He would respond with a shrug and a wink at his daughter, then deliberately add some more.