There was silence on the other end of the phone line. A dog began to bark distantly, the sound conjuring the whirr of sprinklers and wide blue skies and Sydney’s lingering summer heat seemingly trapped in the courtyard behind Marieke’s house, necessitating the watering of delicate ferns and vulnerable herbs well into March.

‘Did you forget the address?’ Marieke said. ‘It’s number 6, Schilderweg –’

‘I remember,’ I interrupted.

‘Well, then?’ Marieke sounded annoyed. ‘I thought the whole reason for your going there was to find closure. You can’t just spend your whole life avoiding what happened. If you wanted to do that, you might as well have stayed here.’

‘I’m not avoiding anything,’ I snapped. ‘I’m here for the dress, remember? I don’t need to go searching for spooks just to bring up the past. You’re the one who can’t let it go. What’s it to you if I can’t remember some lullaby my parents supposedly sang me? It’s probably all nonsense. Your memory isn’t infallible. Maybe you dreamed it up or saw it in a television show years ago. You have no proof.’

‘What about the shoes?’ Marieke said. ‘The shoes from the beach. Your mother kept them for years in an old chest in the attic. After they died I looked for the chest, but I couldn’t find it, it wasn’t in your parents’ things.’

‘That’s because it didn’t exist,’ I said. ‘You’re delusional! They have a term for this kind of thing. Gaslighting. You’re just making excuses, projecting the image you’ve kept of them all these years onto a blank canvas. You’re rewriting history. It’s not fair. It’s all part of the same theme: the lullaby, the shoes, the all-encompassing love. Why don’t you believe me? Doesn’t my opinion count at all?’

When Marieke spoke again, her voice was quiet, tinged with stubborn defiance. ‘What about Gerrit? What did he say when you met him? Did he tell you anything interesting?’

I breathed deeply, trying to quell my natural instinct to shout. ‘Not really. He said they’d been lovers. He apologised for breaking up the family. I forgave him. End of story.’

Marieke sighed. ‘That’s a shame. I was hoping he might know something.’

‘Well, he didn’t.’ Anger pulsed in my gut. ‘I have to go.’

I’d hung up before she could say another word. It was only later, as I was sitting on the ferry watching the waves vanish under the stern and the marina shrink in the distance to dollhouse proportions, that I thought about the photograph Gerrit had taken at the opening of the seal sanctuary. Small fragments of that day had begun to re-establish themselves in my mind, tiny slivers mostly, but they stirred in me a wistful nostalgia, a deep throbbing ache of sadness that not even my obsession with the dress could soothe. Thinking of that photograph now, I tasted buttery popcorn, felt the sticky condensation of a glass nursing bottle and smelled my mother’s hand-cream as she laid her soft palm against my cheek. Had I spun these experiences out of wishful longings or were they real memories? And was it possible that more were out there, waiting for me to find the courage to face them?