“You can keep it if you want,” she says. “I’ve got doubles of them.”

“I’d love it, thank you. I only have one of her.” But then I remember. It was the one on the front of the Order of Service for her funeral. The card I tore up into little pieces. I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t even know why I did. It seems wrong. Almost sacrilegious.

“If we’d been young now, we’d have probably been obsessed with taking selfies, wouldn’t we?” I say, hoping she won’t notice the guilty blush that’s just crept into my face. “I’d have had loads of photos of the two of us.”

“True,” Catherine says.

She takes the album back and eases the photo out of the plastic wallet. Her fingers remind me so much of Alice’s: long and slender with neatly filed nails. She turns a few pages and extracts another photo. Then she hands them both over and I see that the second one is of Alice and me sitting on the swing chair, deep in conversation. It makes my heart lurch seeing the two of us there, so young and innocent. So blissfully unaware of what was to come.

Sheena Dawson is also in the photo—the back of her, anyway. It must have been one of her good days, because she’s chatting to the neighbor over the fence and wearing a pretty summer dress.

“Look at the two of you,” Catherine says. “Thick as thieves.” She chuckles indulgently. “Remember that time the two of you bunked off your geography field trip?”

I hold my breath, unsure how to respond. I had no idea she even knew about that. Alice must have told her. Or maybe she overheard the two of us plotting.

I nod and smile, hoping it’s a passing comment and that she won’t say anything more about it. Because if she knows the details, if she knows how we bunked off, what it was we did in order to get away with it, then that might explain why she doubted my story about what happened the day Alice died. But Alice would never have told her what we did. It was our secret.

“Are you sure I can keep them?” I ask her.

Catherine nods. “Of course. Look at Mum in this picture. She looks so well and happy. So young.”

I breathe a sigh of relief that she’s changed the subject. She probably thinks we just skived off.

37

THEN: BEFORE

SUNDAY, JULY 1, 2007