Would Maureen have done this with Angie? Not that this particular library existed back then. Now the old red-brick library is a Chinese restaurant, although Chloe remembers it when it was fusty and full of books. She has a fuzzy memory of her own mother leaving her there once. A wall of books she can’t see over is still enough to stoke that panic in her. A librarian had found her crying in fiction. She’d lifted her onto the counter and had let her stamp the return dates into the front of borrowed books. For those few hours of her childhood Chloe can honestly say she was truly happy. So happy that she cried sad tears when her mother returned, and, assuming they were tears of relief, the librarian tore strips off her mother. Strips that her mother then tore off her all the way home. Nothing was ever her fault, after all. It was always Chloe’s. Her fault for being born.

Maureen wouldn’t have been that kind of mother, she can tell from the way she fusses, the way she brings up a cup of tea for her in the morning while she’s still in bed, how she’s happy to mix Chloe’s washing in with her own.

How different life might have been.

Back in the library, the mother has tempted her daughter onto her lap. They lie on two big red beanbags in the children’s section, reading about a hungry caterpillar whose appetite was never sated despite how much he ate. Chloe knows that feeling, that hope that the next meal might be enough to turn her into a beautiful butterfly. The little girl kicks her red shoes off and her mother strokes her leg, as if the world was meant just for the two of them. Chloe had always had to share. Nan had Stella. Hollie had Phil. All the other people had someone, and when no one was left, then Chloe competed with memories of the ones that hung around to haunt them. She thinks of the cemetery, the flowers left week in, week out. She’d often wished she was loved with the same loyalty as a dead person.

She turns back to the screen and types in a particular date. She knows most of them by heart now, all the anniversaries that were revisited.

WE’RE STILL WAITING FOR ANGIE.

She reaches out and puts a hand up to the screen. She covers the last word in the headline and whispers her own name.

TWENTY-SEVEN