If it had been possible, Sarah would have called Eliza when she received that piece of news – she the only person Sarah had made privy to that summer’s escapades. As it was, she was here.

She would go in soon and spend a bit of time with her parents before the dreaded train journey back into town. Her mother had barely had a chance to tell her how pale and tired and too thin she appeared, and thus far she’d only waved at her father. He was, as usual, in his vegetable patch on the front lawn. He’d only come to this in his latter years, but approached the agronomy of garlic, peppers and other spiced fare, with a childish gusto and equally ingenuous awe in discovery. Sarah suspected that occasionally their green-fingered next-door neighbour re-did some of his planting, but she didn’t mention this to her father, because of course the harvest and not the process was the point of the thing for him, the successful creation and resurrection of life from stillness. They all mourned Eliza differently.

Her mother’s strategy was busyness, embracing this with the kind of inexorable energy that made others tired from watching. She doubled her client list, concocting all the homeopathic remedies she had professed throughout her career, but now brought her none of the relief she had avowed, except in the time it took to create them and thus not spend thinking about her eldest daughter.

Sarah could not even begin to pretend that she herself was coping. She had at first combined both of her parents’ strategies: she instructed her clerks to approve more and more requests for representation; and she threw herself into the nurture of newness in the form of Amelia and Harry. But nothing was able to fill or distract her from the half of herself that had once contained her sister. Everything felt empty now. The past as well as the future. It was as though every memory was suddenly spliced in half, the parts that remained with her throbbing for those missing. How could she teach Amelia to skip rope without Eliza’s voice chanting the rhymes with her? How could she speak at a university alumnae event without remembering the way Eliza had leapt squealing from her bed the morning that Sarah had received her offer letter from Cambridge? How could she do anything without her greatest confidante, cheerleader, exemplar? Eliza had been there for everything. She had known everything. She had known Sarah. And in Eliza’s knowing, Sarah had known herself.