“Is this for the Dewer case?”

“Yes. It’s a hostile takeover, but the effect is hypothetical since it hasn’t happened yet, so the material effect can’t be proved. Material being the opposite of hypothetical.”

Sarah nodded thoughtfully. She liked Andrew. Born in Uganda, he retained a gentle shape-shifting of certain vowels, and she liked to listen to the sonorous hum of his voice. She liked his sureness. She especially liked this unpicking of words he often invited her to join, and the speed at which her mind leapt gratefully into action, forgoing the distractions otherwise tugging. It was easier here. Eliza had never existed in chambers, so there was no absence to wrestle with, no collection to be made. Not that her latest foray into collection had been the slightest bit successful. It had been foolish to entrust Veronica with it, to trust her with anything. Prejudice, when it came to Veronica, was material and clear.

Or was it? She still wasn’t sure if it was possible for one person, one moment, to really make such an impact. More likely, Sarah was fixating, as she’d always done. Sometimes it was on the Latin roots of words, sometimes it was on ethics and principle, for a long time, and still, it was on Eliza. That’s what her counsellor had suggested anyway. And now Veronica had seeped into her consciousness. A new subject to scrutinise.

What were the facts? They’d only been girls. And there was just one dinner party.

Sarah had never told David how the summer with Veronica ended. It seemed so trivial now, unworthy of the posited impact. David knew only about the distance that Sarah had recalled between herself and Eliza that year, sisters momentarily bound to different sides of adolescence: one, contemptuous of a childish abandon that had slipped suddenly away; the other envious of ungraspable, un-gettable teenagedom. Even without knowledge of Veronica, this was enough for David to insist she not make too much of that summer in her mind. Willingly, he would talk about Eliza. He would recall the first time he’d met her – when Sarah brought him back from university for the weekend and Eliza had flown in from Milan, failing to tell them anything about her past month singing gigs in Italy but insisting on knowing everything about ‘Sarah’s beau’. Just as willingly, David would retell for Sarah the number of times – thirty-eight – that Eliza had called to be updated on Sarah’s progress during Amelia’s birth. He even took a photograph from Eliza’s last birthday – Sarah and Eliza in candid, uncontainable laughter – and in a rare yielding to suppressed talent, he painted it for her on canvas. But he would not humour relics. No staring at rusted tennis rackets. No worship of cast-out necklaces found in her parents’ attic. Those things did not possess Eliza, he said. Active memories were one thing – she was alive in them, real – but there was no point in collecting things inanimate, or distorted. A necklace cast out meant that Eliza no longer saw herself in it. People evolved. It was not fair to tie their memory to something that was just a meandering, just an experiment, unrepresentative of the whole. The summer with Veronica for example, he said, was exactly that. So what was the point in collecting it?