Vee sits on the bench in front of it, and Erica sits down beside her. ‘I heard the story so often, about how you were taking your photographs, and Leonie died, and you kept on taking them instead of helping her, and then you published them.’

‘And you believed it?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Erica says, ‘who doesn’t believe their mother? But then, as I got older, I realised I’d constructed the memory. What I thought was a memory was a sort of’ – she scribbles at her temples with her fingers – ‘a sort of cartoon. A child’s cartoon. You were all big hands and Leonie was bleeding—’

Vee puts a hand over Erica’s. She’s not sure which of them is shaking. ‘She wasn’t bleeding, Erica,’ she says. ‘There was no blood. You can see. Her heart gave out when she was sitting there.’ What a burden for a child.

‘I know that now,’ Erica says, ‘I knew it as soon as I was old enough to think about it properly. And then I looked at the photographs. They weren’t – it wasn’t obvious that she was dead. I could see how you could be – mistaken.’

‘Thank you.’ The next headache is coming, overpowering the painkiller in her system. That was quick. She can feel tension marching along her jawbone.

‘And then when you let me have the contact sheet,’ Erica adds, ‘I was surprised by how relieved I was. When I saw the other images.’

Vee nods. When she blew the images from that up and looked at them closely, she thought she could see the frames between which Leonie’s heart stopped. And she thought there were two images after death, not one. But she is the only one who knows/knew, really, and without her memories there is no record. During her recovery from brain surgery a decade ago, she had had nothing except the last few images on that film to tell her what happened. And they aren’t enough. Photographs on their own don’t tell the whole truth of anything.

‘I remember your camera was on the floor,’ Erica says quietly.

‘What?’ No. Never.

‘When I came in. Before you shouted at me to go. Your camera was on the floor.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I’m sure,’ Erica’s tone suggests that this is the least important part of this conversation.

But Vee has felt something inside her break. Or mend.

Because she would never, ever have put her camera on the floor. Just like she would never immerse it in water. In her hands, round her neck, over her shoulder, in her camera bag; these were the places her camera would be if she was away from home. Nowhere else.

If the camera was on the floor then she did try to save Leonie.

It’s as simple as that.

You can’t do CPR with a camera swinging round your neck.