So here I was. Where I never wanted to be. Always hoping it would be the other way around. Guilt wracked through me, the intensity of which I could never have imagined. The stark reality stared at me from the open door of her wardrobe. Clothes. Tons of them. Shoes too. And handbags. Where would I start? The clothes were too personal. I’d be throwing her away if I dumped them, denying her existence – at least, that’s how I felt today. So, I started – for I had to start somewhere – with the bags. Slender, chic black ones, large brown ones, patent white, mass-produced, designer… mostly leather, because she loved leather… and, underneath them all, one I’d never seen before – a battered floral tapestry bag with almost circular plastic handles. I opened the handles up and peered into the depths – nothing – but on one side there was a compartment with a metal fastener. Its catch clicked smoothly, as if oiled only yesterday and I opened it up to the light. Papers. Folded neatly. And old, yellowed, frayed envelopes. Old bills? Several black and white Kodaks slipped from the pages of a blue exercise book. They featured a couple I’d never seen before… leaning on an ornamental metal rail at the seaside, walking towards the camera on the pier, sitting on deckchairs on the sand with a toddler digging at their feet.

She was an orphan and was both the victim and the result of a single tragic accident. Crushed by a runaway lorry. That’s virtually all she told me about her past. The dreadful event that stole her memory almost took her life too. When she miraculously opened her eyes, aged twenty, she’d had to start again – she learnt to walk, dress, feed herself and struggled with everything she had once taken for granted. After a few months of rehabilitation these everyday skills came flooding back, but her history to that point was lost to her and she began her life anew - unknown, unloved. She was reborn. She even celebrated the day she woke from her coma as her birthday, rather than her actual date of birth, thus acknowledging and proclaiming that her old self had died in the crash. The same hospital in which she passed away just a few weeks ago was also her home for a long time back then. It was, like her, almost new at the time and must have seemed a brighter and shinier edifice than the one we’d spent so much time in recently. After waking, she endured years of reconstruction – operations, counselling and physiotherapy – before she could fully get on with her new life. The scars she carried into adulthood did nothing to diminish her beauty, nor did age - and the childlike enthusiasm and curiosity she acquired as a newborn twenty year-old stayed with her for the rest of her days. Five years after the