Quinn turned his head to see Lucy letting out one of her overblown, mirthless laughs, and he knew then – whether it was to do with his past, their present, or something else entirely – he did not love Lucy. He was going to choose Carol. He wanted to get out of this rabbit hole.

13 September 2020

Minnie was in the garden helping her parents knock down her father’s shed. Now he’d turned the loft into a fully functioning, damp-proof repair studio, he didn’t have any need for the shed, which was taking up valuable space that could be used for her mum’s vegetable project. Minnie’s mother had caught the vegetable growing bug from Tara.

‘Global warming means we should all be growing our own,’ she said by way of explanation.

‘What’s global warming got to do with it, except things grow quicker?’ asked her dad.

‘Well, when tomatoes go up to ten pound a punnet because there’s no land to grow food on, you’ll be glad we got some in our back yard won’t you?’ said her mum, wiping strands of sweaty hair from her eyes with her free hand.

‘If we’re all gonna to be living underwater, you’d be better off learning how to build submarines or growing gills,’ said her dad.

‘It’s strange taking the shed down, the house looks so different without it,’ said Minnie, taking a step back to survey the scene. She was wearing blue dungarees and had a shoebox-sized mallet in her hand. ‘I never realised how much light it was blocking. Look how much sun you’ve got going into the kitchen now.’

‘Perfect for growing things,’ said her mum, eyes wide with delight.

‘I’m going to miss that shed. You know how many clocks I fixed up in there?’

‘You’re just as happy in the loft,’ her mum said quickly.

‘There’s not as much light in the loft though,’ her dad grumbled.

‘Well, you were hogging it all down here, weren’t you?’

Once the shed had been dismantled and the wood piled high in the back of her dad’s van, Minnie went inside to boil the kettle and cut up the fruitcake she’d brought. As she stood waiting for the kettle to boil, her eyes wandered along the shelf, scanning her mum’s cookery books. Stashed between Nigella and Jamie Oliver she noticed her mum’s old grey file of clippings. She pulled it out, absent-mindedly flicking through the contents. She’d never looked through it herself. She’d only been shown the odd article or certificate when her mum brought it out at special occasions.