Then she moved number eleven to the top of the list. It was best to start the day with achievable tasks. She picked up a box which had ‘Minnie’s stuff’ scrawled on the side. Inside was an old karaoke tape player with a broken pink microphone, a half-built Lego Millennium Falcon and an owl money-box she’d painted herself. She shook it hopefully but it didn’t rattle. At the bottom of the box was a pink photo album decorated in blue glitter glue. In round cursive twirls she had written, ‘Summer Camp 2005’. Minnie flicked reverently through the pages. The book was full of pictures of her with Leila the summer they’d first met. Every year, she’d begged her parents to let her go to that summer camp and every year they’d said they couldn’t afford it. They usually just asked Will to watch her in the holidays, but then Will got a summer job, so Dad relented and she was allowed to go.

On that first day at camp she’d seen Leila walking towards her wearing a pink leotard and green hot pants. She was the coolest person Minnie had ever seen in real life. Minnie had cowered as she’d approached, convinced someone like Leila would only be coming over to say something cruel to her – but she’d just smiled and asked Minnie if she wanted to join them for a water-balloon fight. For Minnie, it had been platonic love at first sight.

It took Minnie most of the day to sort out her bedroom; there was so much nostalgia imbued in each object from her childhood. Eventually, she was satisfied that the room felt habitable. She’d rebuilt the bed, stacked all her dad’s boxes neatly against a wall and categorised all her things into: ‘Old To Keep’, ‘Old To Bin’, and ‘Things For Now’. She didn’t want to unpack the ‘Things For Now’ boxes; it would be conceding that her stay at home was more than temporary.

As a final gesture to brighten the space, she propped the only piece of art she owned against a pile of boxes at the foot of her bed. It was a print of a painting called Automat. Leila had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday and Minnie had treasured it ever since. It depicted a woman in hat and coat sitting alone in an American diner, gazing thoughtfully into a cup of coffee. She looked alone, but not lonely, there was something self-contained and contemplative about the woman. You wanted to know what she was thinking, where she had come from, where she might be going. On the back, Leila had scribbled a note – ‘Be a good companion to yourself and you will never be lonely.’ It was one of Leila’s highest aspirations: self-sufficiency.