She seized Viv’s journal, wanting to write the word LONELY, in caps, underlined, but then couldn’t find the little pencil – because it was in the heap of bedding probably. There had to be one on the desk. As she rummaged, the flap of a beige folder flopped open and a photo slid out: a selfie of Dylan and Mei Lin, lying on some grass, heads close, puckering their lips at the camera. Esther’s heart lurched. Dylan – a piece of him she hadn’t seen. Tears pricked her eyes as she drank it in. He looked so heartbreakingly young. As did Mei Lin. Esther stared harder, it gradually dawning that this wasn’t a picture from the summer just gone, but from the one before.

She shook the folder, and more slid out. Picture after picture, some of Mei Lin on her own, most of them together. Sitting at tables, on benches, on buses, outside shops, balancing against stone walls, or statues, on bridges, by fountains, and on a windy, pebbled beach somewhere, the pair of them peeking out from under a huge, bright, stripey towel. There were pencil sketches too, extraordinarily accomplished ones, some of the photos, and some of Dylan, in profile, sleeping, eating, sticking his tongue out. Esther riffled through them all again and again, absorbing the fact that the precociously self-assured girl she had met just once, over three months before, on the morning of her birthday, had been a friend to her son on a scale beyond her wildest imaginings. Not known about, even to Lily.

34

‘What about that one? The sapphire. You said you liked it a minute ago.’ Lucas pointed to the ring at the back of the cluster of options now laid out on the blue velvet mat in front of them. It sat between an emerald and a solitaire diamond – both already dismissed. He had long since stopped thinking about the price-tags. He was too focussed on wanting to see Heidi’s face light up the way it had when he went down on one knee and opened the ring box on his impromptu visit to her flat back in August, a quarter of a year and a lifetime before. They always seemed to be on eggshells now. It had taken weeks of gentle coaxing just to get her into the shop. ‘Late nineteenth century, didn’t you say?’ Lucas glanced at the man behind the counter, a hint of begging in his eyes.