She plugs in the new kettle and watches as it boils, steam rushing into the tiny kitchen. She makes a cup of tea and takes it into the living room. Inside, her eyes wander across the mahogany-stained sideboard and all the paraphernalia Nan has kept on it for years: the cut-glass fruit bowl filled with nothing but dust; the gold carriage clock Granddad got when he retired that ticked for years longer than his own heart. She pauses in front of a framed photograph of him and Stella. She puts down her tea and picks up the frame with both hands. Stella is a little girl, sitting on his lap; she’s wearing knee-high socks and a tartan skirt, her hair cut in a cute little bob that her curls refuse to obey. They are unmistakably father and daughter. How can it be possible to envy intimacy trapped inside a black and white photograph?

She leaves the picture face down, and as she does, catches her own reflection in the leaded glass. Without Nan for context she looks like a stranger in this house.

She kneels down and opens the bottom of the sideboard where she knows the family photo albums are kept. She pulls them out until they lie scattered across the busy patterned carpet. They smell musty, of decades trapped inside. Cross-legged, she sits down among them. She pulls out the giant red one first and hears a soft crackle from the waxy sheets as she turns the pages one by one. There’s Nan and Granddad on their wedding day, Granddad looking so handsome, so fresh from the war he’s still wearing his uniform. Nan, a woman much younger than Chloe is now, her hair cut into a similar bob to Stella’s. She roams through the pages of their lives together, fast-forwarding through their various homes, past baby photos, catching angles of houses and cars she’s sure she recognizes – photographs and memories blurring into one. It doesn’t take much to plant a story inside your head, then water it and watch it grow.

She flicks through and watches as Nan ages. There are photos of her in cone-cupped bikinis sunbathing on the rocks in Ibiza, and others of her as a young mum, a baby on one hip as she poses proudly beside their new VW Beetle.

She flicks through the albums quickly, like a flip book, watching the lines deepen on Nan’s face as first her daughter and then her husband disappear from her side. The photographs stop abruptly then, a few pages short of the end. Instead a large blank fills the space.

Chloe closes the album, and sits with it in her lap in the dim light of the living room. A whole life contained in these albums. But what use are they to Nan now when the memories, the captions for each of those photographs, have already bid her brain farewell?