I open the flaps of the box nearest me and root around inside but it’s all clothes, mostly mine. I open a second box and dip my hand inside, searching for anything hard and plastic, but my delving only reveals more clothing. My heart catches in my throat as the arm of a bright red football hoody rises to the surface. It’s Billy’s. Mark bought it for him when he was twelve after a Bristol City match one weekend. We couldn’t get Billy out of it. He wore it on top of his uniform on his way to school and over his T-shirt at the weekend. He continued to wear it even when his wrists poked out of the sleeves and he could no longer zip it up over his broad chest. He said he’d keep it for ever and then pass it on to his own kids. I couldn’t believe it when I found it in one of the black bags during the declutter. I thought it was a mistake and put it back in his wardrobe.

‘Mum,’ he shouted, a couple of hours later. ‘Why is this in my room?’

He dangled the top over the banister when I came out of the living room.

‘Because it’s your favourite top.’

‘No, it’s not. I hate football.’

He’d always been the first out of the door on match day, woolly hat on his head and scarf wound round his neck regardless of the weather, but he hadn’t been to a City match with Mark and Jake for a while. He didn’t even bother to shout goodbye to them when they left.

I tried not to read too much into it. Kids’ passions can be fickle. When I was little I wanted to be a ballet dancer one year and an air hostess the next and I’d lost count of the number of toys that the boys had been obsessed with for months and then tossed aside, never to be played with again; but football was the one thing that bonded the three men in my life. It was their shared obsession. And then suddenly Billy didn’t want to go any more. I didn’t know if someone at school had teased him about his shrunken hoody or if his love of computer games had superseded his love of football but whenever I tried to talk to him about it he’d close like a clam.

As I yank on the arm of the hoody, something else rises to the surface of the box. The corner of a grey photo album. The one I was looking for. I tuck Billy’s hoody under my arm and flip it open.