I’m still drained from the photo shoot yesterday and the tote bag full of Yin’s things is a burden and my head spins from the time travel.

If I was scared that Chunjuan wouldn’t want to see me, I needn’t have been. Welcome marks her face.

‘No one there?’ Her eyes dart over the garden.

I remember that they’ve been at the centre of a media circus for six weeks now and you’d think they’d lock their front gate, but they don’t. They’ve always been hit and miss with it, that’s the bit no one ever mentions in any of the TV reports about their supposed fortress, and also that the video intercom has never been wired in.

Chunjuan ushers me in and she doesn’t hug me, she grips my arm in that way she’s always had and leans her head into mine. The smell in here, the rose-scented cleaning spray and something pungent simmering on the stove, makes my head spin through layers of time again and I have to breathe to bring myself fully into the here and now.

‘Ice tea, juice, Ovalteen, Pepsi?’ Chunjuan says when we are installed in the kitchen.

‘Ovalteen?’ I didn’t know you could still get it. Chunjuan moves to make it. I let my bag slump to the floor. There are bits of dried grass on it, from where I hid it on the banks of the oval during classes.

I looked through the stuff from Yin’s locker properly at home, finally, and what do you know, there was nothing to worry about, nothing too sinister or heartbreaking and no reason to avoid it. I held her things and I couldn’t tell if she was still the Yin I knew.

The kitchen is the same but different and Chunjuan’s face is the same but different. She pops the microwave door to heat the milk.

The walls are a different colour since I was here last, peach instead of tan. Every appliance is stainless steel and new, but the scrolls on the wall are old and the photos in the frames are too. There’s a picture of Chunjuan and Stephen on a cruise ship, studio portraits of Albert and Nelson, and Yin’s old school photo, the one they used in the first news reports. Maybe the police are holding on to this year’s photo now. I look away quickly.

‘You should have come earlier.’ Chunjuan places a mug in front of me and a plate of biscuits too.

‘I know.’ I burn my mouth on the hot drink and sneak a close look at her. Her jeans and cardigan flap loosely, her face is a hundred years awake. She doesn’t look like she hates me for being alive and well and sitting in her house instead of Yin.

‘How are your parents?’

‘Good.’

‘Your mum sent me flowers. Chrysanthemum. Very nice.’