You don’t put your camera on the floor, ever.

She can almost remember it, now. Taking the portraits, before she knew Leonie was dead. Then, realising the scope of the silence. Only one set of breath: her own. Her voice, crying Leonie’s name. The bulk of her friend’s body sliding from the chair. Forcing Leonie’s jaw open, her small, neat teeth guarding the silent red cave of her mouth.

Lavender. Sweat. Silence emanating from Leonie the way it never had before.

Vee closes her eyes, tighter, tighter, tries to make the memory stay, but it won’t.

It leaves something behind, though: certainty. Vee thought she would never have certainty. But here it is.

She chose her friend above her craft, above her standards. That time, at least, she did not let Leonie down.

That pain in her: it’s definitely a mending. It’s the fibres of her heart knitting together over a place that’s been raw for almost a quarter of a century.

Vee takes Erica’s hand. ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘thank you.’

‘What for?’

‘You don’t know what you’ve given me,’ she says.

It’s time for Vee to give some peace to Erica, if she can. ‘There are things I can tell from looking at the images,’ she says.

‘What can you tell?’ Erica is sitting very still, and the gallery itself is silent, though noises travel up the stairwells, making a city-background hum.

‘I can tell that she was relaxed. She would have been talking. I was moving around her; the position of her shoulders doesn’t move at all. I’d have had her facing a window, maybe a door open into a garden.’ Vee inhales, exhales, wishes the physical pain at least would dissolve. ‘I haven’t changed the set-up – she’s in the same clothes, sitting the same way, against the same background. So I would have been photographing all the time.’

Erica is holding on to the edge of the bench where they are sitting, her gaze fixed on Leonie’s image. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

Vee isn’t sure that she does, either. Not completely. But she continues, ‘Look at the contact sheet. You can’t tell when she – goes. There’s no fall. There’s no cry. Like you say in your notes, you only really know she’s gone when someone tells you. She didn’t suffer. You can see it.’ The ache is creeping round her face now, jawbone, sinuses, temples, forehead. Over the crown of her skull and down her neck.