The housing market boomed. She had an offer she couldn’t refuse for her properties. She was minded to refuse it, all the same – weekends would have to be filled, without the business to keep an eye on – but then the headaches started. That was in 2005. She was lucky, they said, the tumour was operable and treatable. So she was operated on, treated. She gave her solicitor’s name as her next of kin. Women in the hospital tried to make friends with her, but she had no appetite for friendship. There was a gap in her memories when she woke from the surgery, as she knew there would be: a space that made her unconfident when she was with people she was supposed to know. She looked through her old photographs. They didn’t help. If anything, they made her feel lonelier than ever. A photograph was worth nothing if you couldn’t find the emotions that went with it. Sometimes she’d look at an image and feel as though a wind was blowing through her. Mostly, she just felt as though she wasn’t a real person anymore: surgery had reduced her to two dimensions.

She found undeveloped films, and developed them, for the sake of something to do. One of them was mainly shots of Leonie and little Erica. Looking at it hurt, every bit as much as it should, and there was something about the child that Vee knew was important. She almost posted it to Ursula, but her instinct told her to put it away, somewhere safe, instead. No one could tell her anything about what happened when Leonie died, because she hadn’t told anyone.

And through all of those years, the internet had been making itself known, becoming stronger and faster, and women started to connect with each other in new ways, different ways. Vee had imagined a quiet retirement, gentle travels and quiet enjoyment of art and walking, but people who remembered her found her and contacted her via the agency that licensed her photographs. She had ignored them while she was teaching, but now her time expanded again. She got into the habit of day-to-day living: a walk, reading, galleries or films in the afternoon. She marched. She wrote to her MP when prompted by the Fawcett Society. She didn’t think she was unhappy.