Eilish – finally – finishes her shift.

Vera sits, alert. She’s been awake, waiting, since 4 am (as she does every year on this day). From the outside she seems still, but inside she is screaming,

hurry up!...

As soon as she hears Eilish reversing out of the driveway she starts twisting her hips in her armchair, angling for the position required to lever herself into her walker. Standing feels like a miracle these days – she sends a prayer upstairs beforehand. For a second, everything feels like dead weight, but finally, with a guttural grunt, she’s on her feet, legs and hips burning, edging her way to her bedroom.

With one trembling hand pressed down on her walker and the other on her dressing table, she lowers herself – agonisingly slowly – onto her dark, wooden dressing stool. It has hand-turned legs and faded cobalt upholstery fringed in gold.

Its sister table is – almost – her greatest treasure. It is heavily lacquered, a burnt-honey colour with a curved, plate glass tabletop floating on tiny, ivory studs. Rising behind, a Japanese-inspired, triptych mirror with parallel lines frosted into its corners.

She slides the top drawer open gently, then sits – eyes closed – enjoying the waft of lavender. She feels the slight burn as she inhales, and her sinuses clear. Her stiff hands work their way carefully through the silken layers of her underwear drawer, and as she reaches the bottom, she catches sight of the embossed, rose-pink paper she’d lined the drawers with half a century ago.

There’s a panicky moment when she can’t feel the box, but then there it is, under her hand; dark blue velvet with a tight-wound hinge and silver clasp. It had once held a diamond bracelet, sold long ago in tougher times, but now…

Decades before, on a blindingly hot summer afternoon, she’d collected them from a ceremony at Government House. They lie – with their ribbons – in immaculate condition, two either side of a tiny, creased, black-and-white portrait of him, taken that final day. He’s standing – lit by a soft European sun – on the tarmac next to his Spitfire. He’s in full uniform, flight goggles around his neck, his confident, adrenaline-charged grin radiating through the frame.

For a moment, she allows herself to feel him free-falling, screaming, shot out of the sky.

She lets it finish, closes the box, then buries it again in its silk ocean.

Not long now, darling.