It was the butcher’s van that drew up, mid-morning. I’d been ready to go since first light, but it seemed honest to wait until they came to take what had been borrowed, and I needed the station-calm of someone on a platform as I pulled away. The raised hand of a solid goodbye.

Eddie swung down from the driver’s side, and Leonie and his cousin climbed out after him. It was a fine day, and they stretched their necks and tipped their chins to the sun like turtles.

‘All set?’ Leonie called out.

I was. Mrs Robinson was already trapped in the car, likely asleep in the rubble of our belongings.

‘Any idea where you’re off to yet?’

I was wary of suggestions and struggled to find something to say that would nudge the conversation on to other things.

‘Have you got everything?’ I asked Eddie. From the house, I meant. Had he taken everything he was taking, now he’d made the decision to move back to town completely.

‘There’s only the big stuff left,’ he said. ‘Saves me a bit of Bugs Bunny using this thing.’ He slapped the side of the van and it rang like an old dustbin lid, and for a long moment I was halfway down a hill that was my grandmother’s front path, flat-footed and bare-legged, racing my brother and a great iron disc that wobbled and wound its way into a pocked and empty road. Last one to the far side was a rotten egg.

‘He was going to rent something,’ the Coulter said.

‘Yeah, I’d forgotten about this old girl!’ Eddie slapped the van again, but with more care and kindness.

It was a pointless conversation, but no one wanted to be the one to say, ‘Well, this is it then!’ and open the gate.

‘Old’d be right!’ said the Coulter.

‘Now then, you!’ Leonie laughed. ‘It’s bigger than your car, anyway!’ And something in the way she said it badgered a memory. It’s bigger than your car, anyway. Someone else had said that, or something like it. Someone else had wanted the same, and I struggled to remember who that was.

Leonie clipped her nephew’s ear playfully, then gave a little yelp, remembering something close to being forgotten, and hurried back to the van, returning a moment later with a wicker cat basket.

‘I knew we’d kept it after Tiger,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘There’s a lead in there as well. I know, I know!’ She threw a hand up in ready defence and pointed the other at Eddie. ‘Don’t you say anything! It was you who wanted to take the poor bloody thing for walks!’

‘And how did that go?’ asked the Coulter.

‘Yeah, not well.’

Confetti chatter.

‘It might make your drive a bit easier, anyway,’ Leonie said, and another memory stirred: Mrs Robinson wrapped in a cardigan I was cold to be without, the night I found her wandering all alone on Marlow Beach and brought her home, driving carefully with the nest of her in my lap.

A memory layered; there was something beneath it.

Moonlight matted by mist. Police, fire and ambulance scattered around a body in the road. The accident I might have missed by minutes. The highway blocked by blue lights that slowed our journey home. It was King Cole’s car parked on the scrubby verge.

I watched them scrape him, floodlit, off the tarmac. Too late for a siren, the whole scene played out in a terrible silence. Policemen stood to the side. Grey faces lit in flashes by the lights that spun above the cars they came in. They smoked cigarettes and shook their heads, hats high and back where sweaty palms had pushed them clear of foreheads. ‘Move on now,’ they called out when the road was clear. ‘There’s nothing to see here.’

But in the full moon there had been plenty, and the image of Roy Cole’s hair, caught in the teeth of the bag they zipped shut over his face, fell into idle moments for months. The stretch of road he’d spread across stayed dark for weeks, until it rained.

But something still beneath it.

There was a thin root to the memory that I could feel. Something else moved when I worried it, like a ligament that holds a wobbling tooth.

Leonie was still talking, but I was focused on the van behind her, Lamb & Coulter Quality Butchers, and it came to me then, something snapped, and swinging free was a memory clear: Catherine’s voice, library-quiet but clean as water: ‘Something bigger than a car, anyway, Mike said.’

We’ll find him! he’d assured the papers, but they never did.

It had started out as Lamb & Son. Resprayed and re-stencilled but it was the same van. It had always been theirs, and it had always been white.

‘Meg?’ Eddie shook my shoulder gently, and I must have blinked, but Leonie’s was the face I sought.

I hit a cow once, she’d told us.

I could see the headlines and King Cole’s Rotary portrait in newsprint. A hit-and-run, they’d called it, and I remembered Leonie’s story after wine and beer and Baileys on Christmas night.

He was a big bastard. Made a helluva mess.

I think I spoke.

‘What, love?’ The Coulter leaned in.

It was Leonie. Leonie who’d run King down in the middle of the night, driven through him then back over him. ‘As if he were a kangaroo,’ Catherine had said, and speculated as to why he might have been standing out there on the highway. ‘He was sober, you know,’ she’d told me. Well, not completely sober, but he wasn’t drunk, and, ‘Why would you just stand there?’ she’d wondered, as I’m sure her husband and his team had wondered too. As I myself had wondered. You’d jump out of the way, wouldn’t you? You’d see the car coming and you’d throw yourself onto the verge.

But what if someone else who knew the car was coming gave you just a little push?

We don’t want to hear about that now, Tom had said.

They’d sent Joanna home to King the night she’d come to tell them she was leaving. They should have wished her well and kissed her goodbye, but they sent her back to the life that they felt suited her, and better suited them, and in the years that followed, while she turned and turned like a cat in a corner, they came to see her husband for the man he really was. It was Tom and Leonie who Jo called in whispers from behind her bathroom door. They learned of the breaks and bruises, and they heard the names that people called that coffee-coloured, big-eyed baby girl. I wondered how long sorry took to find them, and how many times they’d offered it in the crooks of tired arms.

In the end, it had all worked out, but not by itself.

Too late, Joanna told Leonie after Rosemary’s service, but it hadn’t been.

The Lambs were the only family where no names were called across meat and potatoes. Leonie the only woman in Winifred who could have raised a boy to be the sort of man who’d see a pretty girl and only that; the sort of man who’d see the liquorice hair and wide, warm smile and watch her dance and think, Now, there’s the girl I’m going to marry, nothing more and never less.

‘Well, I guess this is it then,’ Eddie began.

I’m sure I nodded. I’m sure I smiled. I’m sure I kissed the cheek he pulled me into one last time (Take care of yourself… You too), but it was his mother’s eyes I met, as understanding spiralled like smoke between us.

‘You do right by your friends,’ she said softly. Seeing in it that I knew what she had done, and pressing me to keep another secret.

I only nodded. Already with a pocketful, what harm could one more do?