‘I didn’t know you still had this,’ Piper said the next morning, grasping for the handle and then sliding the heavy box out from under the bed.

Connie had still been awake when she’d arrived in the night – even though it had been gone midnight – and she hadn’t even seemed surprised to see her. Piper hadn’t slept – she’d read the texts Holly and Matt had sent her (Holly’s passive aggressive, Matt’s pleading) and lain awake, staring at a water stain in the corner of the ceiling and thinking about how quickly a life could fall apart.

‘I almost chucked it when I moved,’ Connie said, her voice muffled because she was rummaging in the bottom of the wardrobe. ‘But I thought you might want it. Or your sister. But I forgot to mention it to you.’

‘You’ve got the slides too, right?’ Piper said, her voice scratchy with tiredness and tears. The thought that her aunt might have kept the projector but thrown away the slides made her feel sick.

‘They’re under there too, I think. In a tin.’

A Quality Street tin. The Quality Street tin that had been a button box when they were growing up, Piper thought. It was one of the things she’d loved about staying with Connie and Graeme. She would sit in the middle of the floor for literally hours, sorting the buttons into piles or just letting them run through her fingers.

‘Wasn’t this the button box?’ she said now.

‘Oh, I threw those away,’ Connie said. ‘No one replaces buttons any more. Do you want some toast?’

‘I can do it,’ Piper said, automatically.

‘I bought some jam,’ Connie said, frowning. ‘But I can’t remember where I put it.’

‘Okay.’ Piper followed her into the kitchen. ‘Jam. I like jam.’

She opened the fridge and shifted around the random assortment of food: a dried-up lemon in the door, a packet of ham, an open tin of soup, the surface dotted with mould.

‘This one’s a bit past its best,’ she said, taking it out and putting it on the counter, ready for the bin.

‘Oh rubbish,’ Connie said. ‘I don’t take any notice of all the sell-by and use-by dates. It’s all a trick to make you spend more money. They didn’t have them when I was young.’

‘This one’s mouldy though,’ Piper told her. ‘That’s usually a bit of a clue.’

‘You can just scrape that off,’ Connie said.

And Piper suddenly remembered an argument when she was small. She and Holly staying with Connie. Connie slicing mould off the chunk of cheese she’d been about to use to make them cheese and crackers. Holly refusing to eat it, crying, saying she’d be sick. And Connie snapping and saying, ‘Do it yourself then!’ and stalking upstairs. Uncle Graeme had made them toast with honey instead.

‘I don’t think it’s in here,’ Piper said, crossing the kitchen to the cupboard above the kettle. She moved boxes of tea and jars of spices. The shelf was sticky and crunchy with salt.

‘I sometimes put things on the top shelf,’ Connie said, ‘if I buy them before I need them.’

The top shelf was full of bags of flour, icing sugar, those little silver candy balls for cakes.

‘Do you still bake?’ Piper asked.

‘I haven’t. Not for a while. Can’t work this oven.’

‘Oh, there’s honey!’ Piper said. On the second shelf. ‘How about honey?’

But when she unscrewed the lid, the honey was mixed with something brown. Marmite? Nutella? Gravy? There was no way of knowing.

‘Biscuits!’ Connie said so suddenly that Buster let out a small yap. ‘Beryl brought me more of those blasted biscuits.’

---

When Piper first switched the projector on, the square of light was small, low on the wall behind Connie’s sofa. She turned the dial on the front to make it bigger, but they had to find a pile of books to rest it on before they could get it centred on the wall.

Even the humming sound took Piper back to childhood. Her stomach twisted with a combination of nerves and excitement. She knew what was on the slides. And she wanted to see them. But she also didn’t.

‘Ready?’ she asked Connie, lifting a slide out of the tin. Connie was ready. Piper wasn’t sure she was.

---

She slotted the slide into the projector and clicked the button. The slide appeared on the wall, but out of focus and upside down.

Connie snorted. ‘That always used to happen. I’d forgotten about that.’

Piper felt like she was holding her breath, like she was waiting for some great mystery to be revealed, as if the photo on the wall could change everything. Instead, when she got it in focus and the right way up, she saw herself and Holly, sitting on donkeys on the prom.

‘I can’t remember that at all,’ she said, frowning. ‘I’ve always said I’ve never been on a donkey. I went horse riding once with—’

With Rob. She didn’t want to think about Rob.

Connie was holding slides up to the light, turning them the right way round and slotting them into the projector. She glanced up at the photo.

‘That’s just in front of the new flats. Where your fella lives.’

Piper hadn’t realised, but she was right. The fort in the background. But the apartment block hadn’t even been built back then.

‘Remember Graeme’s darkroom?’ Connie said, still slotting slides.

Piper hadn’t thought about the darkroom for years, but as soon as Connie mentioned it, she could smell the chemicals, feel the excitement of watching the photographs appear in the trays.

‘He always had to be first with anything new,’ Connie said. ‘He hired a video camera once, for a party. This would be in the eighties. It was like a TV camera. Had to balance it on his shoulder and it had a separate thing… you know. The sound thing.’

‘Microphone?’ Piper guessed.

‘That’s it,’ Connie said. ‘On a stick. It picked up every sound in the room. Like in Singing in the Rain.’

She clicked onto the next slide. Christmas in Whitby. Piper was eight and Holly ten. They were sitting at the dining table in the cottage they’d hired, both wearing paper hats from crackers. Holly looked perfect, her hair in a neat bob, smiling at the camera. Piper’s hat had fallen down over one eye and she was trying to look up from under it, her mouth half open, tongue poking out.

‘She was a proper little madam even then,’ Connie said.

She was, Piper thought. But she’d been Piper’s best friend too. They’d go to bed in separate rooms and wake up in the same bed because one or both of them had had a nightmare. At primary school they’d obviously been in different classes, but they had the same friends and played together at playtime and lunch. It had been high school when things had changed and Piper still didn’t know why.

The next slide showed Piper on her own, sitting on the sea wall, just near where she and Rob had sat and watched the sun come up after their aborted run. She wondered if he’d slept after she’d left or if he’d got up and run down the prom in the dark. She wondered if he’d seen the rabbits. She wondered if he was asleep now or if he was thinking about her too.

The slide after that showed Holly and Piper with their parents, sitting what looked like halfway up a mountain. Piper had no idea where it could have been taken. She certainly didn’t remember it, and they’d never been that much of an outdoorsy family.

‘Where was this?’ Piper asked Connie, still staring at the screen. Holly looked poised, smiling into the camera while also managing to look slightly conniving. Piper looked flushed, squinting and frowning into the sun. She could barely look at her parents.

‘Connie?’ Piper said again. ‘Do you know where this was taken?’

She turned to look at her aunt. She was slumped in her seat, her head back against the cushions.

Piper’s stomach clenched with fear. There was something about her aunt’s face that just didn’t look right. She grabbed her hand. ‘Connie? Aunty Connie? Wake up? Please? Please.’