As the years wore on and Zadie was a more and more distant memory, she knew that it was unlikely. More and more unlikely. Eventually, almost impossible. But now, it was actually impossible. Completely, really, truly impossible. Zadie had always been there in the back of her mind, like an imaginary friend. She would hear her voice when she was deciding whether or not to buy a dress she couldn’t afford, or sitting next to someone painfully dull at a dinner party. The fact that Zadie was dead shouldn’t matter, not really. Nothing in Chloe’s life had changed. But somehow, despite the fact Zadie had been no more alive for Chloe last week than she was now, Zadie was gone for her. The wicked little laugh, the ideas, the naughtiness. She couldn’t hear it any more. It was gone.

At some point in the years that Chloe and Rav had lived in the flat, they had decided that it was too much work to look for anything that wasn’t immediately at hand and, besides, the flat was so tiny they couldn’t afford to waste a single centimetre of space. Every single one of their belongings that wasn’t used every day was stored in a tiny, dark room which the estate agent had optimistically called a ‘storage nook’. But today was going to be different. Chloe took out box after box, more than a little pleased that she had been so methodical when she had packed it all away. She found the record player she had bought Rav for his thirtieth birthday, when they’d lived with Lissy and Guy in the much bigger flat, and another box, filled with records. For a while, records had filled a little cavity in their marriage. Record-buying had become an activity. They stopped at charity shops as they passed to see if they could add to their collection. Surprised each other with strange or funny records they’d seen.

There was almost no space in the living room. A little round table, two bookshelves, a fireplace, a sofa and a TV. But, she reasoned, they never ate at the table, preferring to sit on the sofa and watch something mindless during the winter, or in the little garden in the summer. So she put the record player back together, wiring up the speakers and feeling beyond smug when the scratchy, warm music began to play, pulling her back to a time five years ago when she was newly married, living with her best friends and still convinced that everything would somehow be okay.

19

Then