“When the doctors told us she was dying I held her hand and gave up. We both did. I know it wouldn’t have made any difference in the end but I wish I had let her see how much I wanted to keep her. I should have raged, Maureen.”

He sat bent over his cup of tea, as if in prayer. He didn’t look up. He repeated the words with a quiet intensity she had not seen in him before, so that his cup trembled on its saucer. His knuckles were pure bone. “I should have raged.”

The conversation stayed with Maureen. She grew low again, and spent hours staring out of windows, remembering the past, but doing very little. She considered the young woman she had been, who was so sure she could be everything for Harold, and then she considered the one she had become. Not even a wife. She retrieved the two photographs she had found in his bedside drawer; the one of herself laughing in the garden after they were married, and the one of David with his first pair of shoes.

Something about the second image made her start. She had to look again. It was the hand. The hand supporting David as he balanced on one leg. A cold shiver slipped the length of her spine. The hand was not hers. It was Harold’s.

It was she who had taken the photograph. Of course. She remembered now. Harold had held David’s hand while she fetched the camera. How had she blocked that piece of the past from her head? Years she had blamed Harold for never holding their son. For not giving him the love a child needs.

Maureen went to the best room and pulled out the albums that no one looked at. The edges were felted with a layer of dust that she wiped with her skirt. Blotting back tears, she studied every page. They were mostly of herself and David, but tucked among them there were others too. He lay in Harold’s lap as a baby, while his father looked down at him, hands in midair, as if forbidding himself to touch. There was another of David sitting on his father’s shoulders while Harold craned his neck to balance him upright. There was David as a teenager side by side with Harold, the young man in black, and long-haired, the father in jacket and tie, both of them peering over the goldfish pond. She laughed. They had tried for closeness. Not in an obvious way. Not in a way that was everyday. But Harold had wanted it, and even David occasionally. She sat with the album wide open in her lap, and stared into the air, seeing not net curtains but only the past.