In the end, the only strategy that made a dent in Sarah’s devastation was collection. From the Latin colligere – not necessarily accumulation, but gathering together. In the twenty months that had passed since the accident, Sarah had spent hour after hour at their childhood home, collecting. David worried. He viewed it as a kind of atonement, a self-imposed penitence – it had after all been Sarah’s train that Eliza had been driving out of her way to meet, because Sarah was too petrified of the just-around-the-corner tube. Too nauseous to face it. Sarah’s mother suggested this hypothesis too and told her not to blame herself. Her father agreed. It was for them that she had finally conceded to a counsellor. But it made no difference. Methodically, Sarah collected pieces of her sister: the kitchen table, where Eliza had sat in pigtails, then with strands of blonde bleached into darkness; the shared bathroom where they had compared suntans and the evolving size of their breasts; the old TV on which they had watched Dirty Dancing on repeat; the tennis rackets that had once been bright and shiny and instrumental for their doubles triumphs; the closet that housed the coats they ‘borrowed’ from each other without asking; the swing-seat out front where they’d resolved a thousand tiny quarrels; the bedroom Eliza had presided over and where Sarah had sat, listening to tales of playground foes, and revision notes, and first kisses, and boyfriends, and ambitions, and plans. After the accident, people had remarked that the saving grace of the tragedy was that Eliza had not yet married, she had not left young children behind. But children may have borne Eliza’s blue eyes, or her infectious smile, or at least her blood and her genes, and even in glimpses and flashes Sarah may have had a way then to see her sister again. As it was, there was nothing but inanimate objects for her to collect. And memories. Like the summer at the pool house, when Eliza had buried herself in books and hormones and thoughts that Sarah wasn’t yet privy to, and Sarah had swum naked with Veronica.

Sarah ran her fingers over the flaking wood of the pool house door and considered how, despite the intangible sense of foreboding that the sight of Veronica incited, perhaps her reappearance was fateful. Perhaps it was significant that after all these years, now was when she materialised. Perhaps she was part of Eliza’s story too. Perhaps she was supposed to be a part of Sarah’s collection.

Veronica

At the top of the high street, between an expensive children’s boutique and a café that served tea in floral pots with hand-knitted cosies, stood Veronica’s most recent Primrose discovery: a convenience store that stocked everything from American graham crackers, to Chinese ready-meals, to proper deli-standard chunks of brie. The place had a bohemian quirkiness, and she always managed to find something there that she hadn’t even thought of needing. Besides, it padded the time between finishing school, and going home.