Erica was not surprised, the next morning, to get the phone call to tell her that Veronica Moon had died, peacefully, in her sleep.

*

Marcus puts the sling on over his coat and nestles the baby into it; Tom says he wants to walk, because he’s too big for the buggy.

‘Do you want to do this on your own?’ Marcus asks. He already has a hand out to Tom.

‘I think so,’ Erica says, ‘I won’t be long.’

‘Be as long as you need to be. We’ll go and throw sticks in the river,’ he says, and then, kissing her on the forehead that’s accessible under her hat, ‘I’m proud of you. And I love you.’

‘Thank you. I love you too.’ The moment is warm and sweet enough for her to taste it on her tongue, where it melts the frosted air. The last few months, for all that they have been filled with tiredness and tag-team parenting, may have been her and Marcus’s happiest. It was as though Erica inherited some of Veronica’s uncompromising spirit with her archive. She told Marcus exactly what she needed; why she was unhappy; what she was afraid of. He listened. He changed his working hours; she signed a contract to edit Leonie’s and Vee’s unpublished books, to write their linked biographies. (Vee’s photography book had been a surprise. Erica can only assume she forgot about the manuscript.) Baby Leonie Sarah was born two days after Erica’s thirty-ninth birthday, and she was not easy, not peaceful, not calm. She was loud and determined and Marcus and Erica could not love her more.

They arrive at the gate of the churchyard, where an older woman is just leaving, dead flowers in a basket on her arm. Erica steps back for her to pass through. She smiles at them both, says hello to Tom, and then looks in the sling at the sleeping Leonie.

‘Oh, bless,’ she says, then, looking up at Marcus, ‘Boy or girl?’

Marcus smiles. ‘Baby.’

*

Ursula’s funeral would have been the last time Erica was here. Four years. And yesterday, and tomorrow. This place is as timeless as a photograph.

The granite headstone lists Erica’s grandparents, then Leonie, then Ursula. The grass around it is short and sparse; the ground, where Erica kneels, pushes cold into her knees.

At Vee’s wake, Bea had proposed that there was no one place for Veronica Moon to rest. In the months since, her ashes have been taken, by one of the sisters or another, to the places that were important to her. Fen went to the Colchester graveyard where Vee’s father was buried, Bea to the Peace Garden at Greenham Common; Gloria to the gardens opposite the Royal Albert Hall. And Erica is here.