What She Kept Was the Royal Doulton. Seventy Pounds the Lot.

The clock is in a private collection somewhere in the Netherlands.

Aoife knows this because Stephen told her, months later, in an email he did not have to send, and which ended: Thought you might like to know it went somewhere it will be looked after.

She has never seen a photograph of it since. She has thought about asking and has not asked.

---

Marcus put his seventeen and a half thousand into the house. Jen put hers into a pension she had been quietly panicking about for a decade and mentioned to nobody until it was done.

Aoife’s twenty-two thousand paid off the last of a loan and replaced a car that had been on its way out for two years, and about four thousand of it is still sitting in an account doing nothing, which she is aware is a slightly strange thing to leave there and which she has not moved.

---

What she kept, out of the entire house, was the Royal Doulton.

All of it. Every piece. Seventy pounds the lot, per a professional valuation, and she has the paperwork.

It is in a glass-fronted cabinet in her dining room and it takes up the whole cabinet, and she dusts it about every six weeks, which is less often than her mother did and more often than it warrants.

She does not much like it. She has never liked it. As a child she was not allowed to touch it and she resented it, and as an adult she thinks the figurines are, objectively, not very nice.

She is not going to explain that to anybody, and when people ask — and people do ask, because it is not to everybody’s taste and it is right there in the dining room — she says “it was my mother’s” and changes the subject.

---

The three of them are, oddly, closer now.

Not transformed. Marcus is still in Swindon and still eaten by his job, and Jen is still in Dublin, and there is still no world in which any of them ring each other for no reason.

But there is a group chat that did not exist before. Jen came over twice last year. Marcus rings Aoife on her birthday, which he did not used to do, and they talk for about twelve minutes and it is slightly awkward and they both do it anyway.

And once, at Christmas, at Marcus’s, with the children asleep, he said out loud, to the room: “Aoife did eleven years.”

He did not look at her when he said it. Nobody replied, because it was not the kind of thing that needed replying to.

That, Aoife thinks, was the thing she had been saying no for six weeks in order to get.

---

She gives one piece of advice now, to anybody who is about to clear a parent’s house, and she gives it whether or not they have asked.

“Get a valuer in first. It’s a hundred and forty quid and it takes two hours.”

And then she says the second half, which is the half she means.

“And if he finds something — ring them before you know what it’s worth. Not after. Before. Because after, you’ll have had a number in your head for an afternoon, and you’ll have thought about what you could do with it, and you will still probably ring them. But you’ll know you thought about it, and you’ll have that for the rest of your life.”

---

She has never told Marcus or Jen about the four seconds in the hallway.

She has told two friends and a woman she sat next to at a wedding, and each time she has told it as a thing that happened rather than a thing she is confessing.

The thought arrived. She noticed it. She rang her brother anyway.

She has decided that is what people are actually like, and that pretending otherwise is how you end up believing you would never have done it.