Vee lasted for a week after being taken ill at the exhibition opening. Erica saw her the day before she died. Vee was in bed, at home, a nurse within earshot. Though Erica had known that she was ill, she wasn’t ready for her to be so still, lying tucked under a duvet even though the room was warm, her face a dying grey against the white bedlinen. She’d brought the reviews of the exhibition to show Vee, though she could have recited most of them. ‘A thought-provoking triumph’, ‘a must-see for anyone who cares about the past – and the future – of feminism’. She still couldn’t believe it. She’d spent a week doing three things: reading reviews, checking to see how Vee was doing, and looking at the contact sheets of her and Tom, and her and Leonie, and trying to make up her mind that Leonie truly was her birth mother. It had seemed certain, on the night of the exhibition opening; as the days passed, it began to look like more of a stretch of imagination. She’s checked her birth certificate, even ordered another copy just to be sure. Marcus said her mother was the one who raised her. She knew she shouldn’t even entertain the thought of Leonie as a mother. She’s an academic. There was no real evidence. Vee, with her missing memories and her dying brain, was not a reliable witness. And yet, she had not been able to leave the idea alone.

‘It’s Erica,’ she said, taking Vee’s hand.

Vee opened one eye, slowly, then the other, turned her head on the pillow, smiled. There was pain, and effort, in the movement; Erica felt an answering ache in her heart, knew it was grief, waiting. She wasn’t ready to lose Vee. She had barely found her.

‘Do you need anything?’

There was a fraction of a shake. ‘My sight’s starting to go,’ Vee said, as though it was an answer: if I can’t see, everything is irrelevant, unwanted.

‘Oh.’ Tears in Erica’s throat stopped her from saying more. And if Vee wasn’t crying, she shouldn’t be. She wouldn’t ask Vee for anything: not comfort, not answers.

Vee nodded, another tiny movement. ‘I’m leaving you my papers. I didn’t go through them. Leonie used to send me her writing, though. I never threw it away.’

Erica squeezed Vee’s hand, and got out a ‘Thank you’, even though she was almost mute with misery. Ursula’s deathbed had been like this, too: not so lucid, not so serene, but every bit as impossible to endure.

Vee closed her eyes. ‘Thank you. I didn’t think I cared that I was forgotten. But I did.’

And then she seemed to sleep. Erica sat with her until the nurse came quietly up the stairs and touched her on the shoulder, dismissing her.