They would never be able to see what the memory of the house looked like inside Jack’s head: the well-mapped, in-depth and painfully specific details of each minor event. Kate’s conversation with McCormick to tell him they had arrived. Alex taking little Matthew’s room and sleeping under dinosaur bedsheets. (Everything related to dinosaurs stuck in Jack’s head like the intro to ‘The Final Countdown’, while most people wouldn’t have even remembered the little boy was called Matthew.) That joke he had made about Dawn Hunter, asking if she was some kind of vampire assassin, and nobody getting it. Charlie saying ‘the last time he kissed a woman he still called her “Mummy”’, and everyone laughing.

It wasn’t the joy or the pain that made the night memorable. Jack Hopper simply didn’t get a choice in what he remembered. Once a memory was in his brain it stayed there like a fly stuck to insect paper, never to leave. Sometimes it meant memorising fifty-eight species of sauropod at the age of six. Sometimes it meant remembering number plates of random cars on long journeys, whether he wanted to or not.

To Gracie at that moment, it just meant knowing his way around a village. Jack found his way to School Lane, and the Hunters’ house was there as promised.

A little part of Jack had expected the house to look welcoming, perhaps for the grass to be more colourful than he remembered or the windows to look cleaner. But nothing special awaited them. The two-storey building looked as dulled and silent as before, indifferent to the return of an old visitor. Jack walked up the garden path and pushed the front door open, holding his breath to avoid choking on the dust.

Dust. Unless Ewan had used a different entrance, he had not arrived yet.

Eight y per cent of dust is human sk in. Maybe some of this is ours.

Maybe a part of Charlie still exists here.

‘You OK, Jack?’ Gracie whispered.

Apparently he hadn’t hidden his misery as well as he had thought.

‘Charlie spent his last night on Earth here,’ he answered.

‘I thought he made it to New London?’ she asked. ‘And died three days later?’

‘I don’t count that as Earth.’

Jack made his way to the living room, and his eyes met the spot on the floor that had been his bed three weeks earlier. He wondered what Ewan’s reaction would be once he arrived, whether his own memories would be as specific, and his emotions just as provoked. It took Jack a moment to remember that he was supposed to check the house for clones, rather than taking a trip down Crap Memory Lane.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ asked Gracie.

‘You just did.’

She sighed behind him.

‘Why do you always do things like that?’

‘Is that your real question, or another supplementary one?’