Facedown under the notebooks there’s a photo frame, the one she used to keep on her desk at work: her and Lily at their mother’s wedding, arms around each other with their tongues poking out. Both tall with matching wheat-coloured hair parted harshly in the middle, skin tinted tan, blue eyes ringed with black liner. Lily’s dark-brown spray of freckles charming as always, Oli’s plumper face completely unmarked. Their dad always delighted in telling the story of a toddler-aged Oli trying to wipe the dirty spots off Lily’s face when she was sleeping. The photo had been taken a few years before Oli met Dean. She had deferred from her arts degree and was waitressing at a hotel bar in the city; she made more from tips than from her hourly wage, wrote the occasional magazine article, and worked on short stories when she couldn’t sleep. Lily was employed at the art gallery and dating a revolving door of attractive men.

Oli looks at the photo again. Both girls are flushed, full of champagne and broadly happy for their mother, if only because they were relieved that she was finally someone else’s problem.

Eleven years before the girls posed at their mother’s wedding, Bradley Groves had gambled away the last of the family savings and taken off in their only car, never to be seen again, leaving their mother with a mound of debt and no obvious way to pay it back. Seven years after that, Oli had scraped her unconscious mother off her bedroom floor, still picking up the mess he had left behind.

Pretty Lily and jolly Oli.

Oli’s jaw starts to ache, and she swallows determinedly. Why does this photo make her so sad? Lily seems happy enough now; Shaun adores her, and they’ve bonded over their mutual hatred of his ex-wife. Oli has Dean. And the girls. Their lives are a version of what they used to talk about when they speculated about their futures. In many ways, it’s all turned out better than they ever thought it would.

But Oli feels guilt when she looks at this photo, like she’s somehow betrayed this former version of herself.