Chapter 1

I'm writing this down because I don't trust what I'll remember next week.

My wife, Helen, says to put everything in, even the boring parts. Especially the boring parts. I'm posting it here instead of keeping it on my laptop because once it's somewhere public I can't quietly go back and change it. I don't know why I think I'd want to. I'd just rather not be able to.

My daughter started waving at the house across the road about two weeks ago.

She does it during breakfast. Maya is five, which means breakfast takes roughly forty minutes and involves almost no actual eating. She sits at the end of the table nearest the front window, pulls the crust off her toast even though I've told her approximately six hundred times that the crust is also bread, and waves at the upstairs window of number eighteen.

The house has been empty since before we moved in.

I've never seen anyone go in or out. There are newspapers melted into the concrete beside the letterbox, and there used to be a FOR SALE sign out front until it blew over during a storm in August. Nobody has bothered putting it back up.

I didn't think much about the waving until one morning I asked who it was for.

"The girl."

I looked across the road. The upstairs window was dark.

"What girl?"

She sighed in the way five-year-olds do when an adult has failed a very basic intelligence test.

"The girl in there."

"There's nobody in there."

"There is."

"Okay."

That was the whole conversation. Maya went back to mutilating her toast and I went back to packing her lunch.

Helen leaves for work before seven three days a week, so mornings on those days are mine. Lunchbox, hair brushed badly enough that Maya usually makes me redo it, then the eleven-minute drive to school while she asks questions like whether fish get thirsty. The girl became part of that routine. Maya waved. I didn't look. Sometimes she'd say, "She's there today," and sometimes, "She's not at the window yet."

Once she told me the girl had different hair.

I asked what she meant.

"Down."

"Down how?"

Maya pulled her own ponytail loose to demonstrate, then became furious because I'd apparently made her ruin her hair.

That was more or less the level of concern I had about it.

Two days ago, somebody waved back.

I was standing at the kitchen bench cutting strawberries when Maya said, "See?" She sounded excited.

I looked.

A little girl was standing behind the upstairs window.

I nearly cut my thumb.

She was far enough away that I couldn't make out much. Dark hair, pale face, maybe Maya's age or slightly older. She was standing very close to the glass with one hand raised beside her head.

My first thought was the sensible one. Someone had bought the place. A family was looking around. Maybe the owner's kid was there while they cleared it out.

Then the girl moved her hand.

A slow wave.

Maya waved harder. "Hi!"

The girl kept waving.

I put the knife down. "What?"

Maya was grinning at me. "She did it."

I stepped closer to the window.

The girl stopped moving. Her hand stayed raised.

It took me a few seconds to work out what was wrong. Maya was sitting right up at the window. I was at the bench, a couple of metres further back. If the girl had been waving at Maya, she'd have been looking down, at the window itself.

She wasn't looking down.

She was looking past Maya, into the room.

At me.

I lifted my hand without really deciding to. Not a proper wave. More that stupid little half-raise you do when you accidentally make eye contact with someone.

The girl's fingers moved once.

"She likes you," Maya said.

I told her to finish her breakfast. When I looked back, the window was dark.

That was at about seven thirty.

At eleven, I remembered buying June the rabbit cup.

I was at work when it happened. There's nothing interesting about what I do. I deal with insurance claims, mostly property damage, which means large sections of my day are spent looking at photographs of wet ceilings and asking people whether they still have receipts for televisions they bought in 2018.

I went to make coffee and somebody had left a pink mug beside the sink. That was all. Pink mug.

And suddenly I remembered standing in a shop holding two children's cups.

One had a rabbit on it. One had little yellow flowers.

June wanted the rabbit. I told her the flower one was nicer. She crossed her arms and said, "Then you have it."

I laughed. In the memory, I mean. At work I was just standing there.

I could see the shop clearly. Bright lights. Grey floor. A display of lunchboxes behind her. June had her hair in two uneven plaits because I'd done them myself.

I remembered buying the rabbit cup.

Then I was standing in the office kitchen with my hand under running water.

I hadn't turned the tap on.

I shut it off.

There is no June. I have one child. Maya.

I stood there for maybe a minute trying to work out where the name had come from, and eventually I decided it had been a dream. That's genuinely what I thought. People remember bits of dreams during the day. Something sets one off and for a few seconds it feels more real than it has any right to.

I went back to my desk. By half past eleven I was embarrassed I'd let it bother me.

I didn't think about the house again until dinner.

Helen had made spaghetti. Maya had eaten about four mouthfuls and was trying to wind one piece around her fork without touching it with her other hand, which she apparently considered cheating.

I said, "June, just eat it."

Nobody reacted straight away. Including me.

For maybe two seconds the name didn't feel wrong.

Then Helen said, "Who?"

I looked at Maya. She was staring at me.

"Sorry."

"Who the hell is June?"

"I don't know."

Maya put her fork down. "The girl."

Helen looked at her. "What girl?"

"The window girl."

I asked Maya what she'd said.

"Her name's June."

"How do you know that?"

She shrugged. "That's her name."

"Did she tell you?"

Another shrug. Maya does that when she thinks the difference between yes and no is unimportant.

Helen asked what we were talking about, so I explained. I expected her to laugh. She didn't. She went to the front window and looked across the road.

There was nobody there.

"Probably someone viewing the house."

"That's what I thought."

"So?"

"So I called Maya June."

Helen gave me the look she normally saves for when I've spent twenty minutes trying to repair something that should have taken five minutes to replace. "You've heard her say it."

Maya said, "I didn't tell Daddy."

"Sweetheart, you just told him."

"No. Before."

Helen rubbed her forehead. "Can we please eat dinner?"

Maya picked up her fork. Then she looked at me and said, very casually, "She said you'd remember."

Helen stopped rubbing her forehead.

I didn't ask Maya anything else. I wish I could say that was because I didn't want to frighten her. Mostly I didn't want to hear the answer.

That evening I put her to bed. She has a routine involving one story, one glass of water and an increasingly complicated series of negotiations over whether the hallway light stays on. I read half of The Gruffalo before she interrupted me.

"Do you remember when I hurt my chin?"

"Yes."

I kept reading.

"When?"

I stopped. Maya was watching me over the top of the blanket.

"You fell over."

"Where?"

"The playground."

"Which playground?"

I knew this. She had split her chin open badly enough to need glue at the hospital. Helen had been at work. I'd taken her. There had been blood all over her shirt.

Except when I tried to remember it, the shirt was yellow.

Maya didn't own a yellow shirt like that.

June did.

I could see her sitting on the kitchen counter with a tea towel pressed under her chin. She was crying. I was telling her not to look at the blood because it always looked like more than it was. Her dark hair was stuck to one cheek.

"Daddy?"

The bedroom came back. Maya was still looking at me.

I said, "The park near Grandma's."

Her face changed. "No."

I knew I'd got it wrong before she told me.

"It was school."

"Right."

"You came."

"I know."

"Mrs Price called you."

"Yeah."

"Then we went to the hospital."

"I remember."

I didn't.

I knew it had happened.

That's not the same thing.

There were facts in my head. Mrs Price. The hospital. Skin glue. Maya getting an icy pole afterward because she'd been brave. But if I tried to see it, I saw June.

Helen found me sitting on the edge of our bed about twenty minutes later, and I told her everything. The cup, the shop, June's hair, the yellow shirt.

She sat beside me without saying anything for a while. Then she asked me what Maya wore on her first day of school.

"That purple backpack."

"What did she wear?"

"Uniform."

"What shoes?"

I got annoyed. "I don't fucking know, Helen."

She went quiet. I apologised.

She said, "She wore those black ones she hated because they rubbed her heel."

And then I remembered.

June standing beside our front door in black shoes.

June pulling one foot backward when I tried to take her photograph.

June saying they hurt.

I stood up so quickly I hit my knee against the bedside table. Helen followed me downstairs.

I don't know why I went to the window. That's probably the stupidest thing I've done in this entire situation, and I've had plenty of time to think about it.

The upstairs window at number eighteen was dark.

Then the curtain moved.

June stepped into view.

I knew her immediately.

That was new.

Dark brown hair to her shoulders.

A pale blue nightdress.

A round face, a slightly crooked front tooth, a little mark beside her right eyebrow.

I knew that mark.

She got it falling off her scooter.

I carried her home while she cried into my neck.

I cleaned gravel out of her palm.

She asked if she needed stitches.

I told her no.

Behind me, Helen said my name.

I couldn't answer.

June wasn't looking at Helen. She wasn't looking toward Maya's bedroom.

She was looking at me the way kids look at you when you've finally turned up to collect them.

I stepped away from the window.

The memory stopped changing. Or it stopped getting bigger, anyway. It didn't go anywhere. I didn't know yet whether that was a rule or just luck.

Helen hadn't seen her. By the time she got to the glass there was only the curtain. She called the police anyway. "If there's a kid in there, somebody needs to know. If there isn't, I want somebody who isn't you to tell me."

Two officers came about forty minutes later. I stayed in the hallway, away from the window, while they walked round number eighteen with torches. Front door locked. Side gate chained. Afterwards one of them told Helen the place had been shut up since the owner went into care, and that streetlights do funny things on old glass.

Helen said, "Okay," in the voice she uses when she's stopped arguing, not when she agrees.

The next morning we kept the curtains closed. Maya complained because she wanted to wave. Helen snapped at her. Maya cried, and then Helen cried because she'd snapped at her, and I burned two pieces of toast. Nobody ate much.

At about eight, Maya asked why I was being weird.

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm tired."

"Are you cross at me?"

"No."

"Are you cross at the girl?"

I didn't answer. Maya pushed cereal around her bowl.

"She looks at you more."

"What do you mean?"

"She looks at you when I'm not there."

Helen was standing at the sink. She turned around slowly. "When you're not where?"

Maya pointed toward the window. "Sometimes I go get dressed and she's still looking."

"At the house?"

"At Daddy."

Helen looked at me for a long time. Then she took Maya to school.

I called in sick. I should have gone with them. I can't really explain why I didn't, except that leaving felt like a decision and I didn't have one in me. So I sat in the living room with the curtains closed and tried to remember my daughter.

That sounds ridiculous. I know who Maya is. I know her birthday. I know she hates bananas unless they're blended into something, which makes absolutely no sense. I know she sleeps diagonally. I know she says "aminals" even though she can pronounce "animals" perfectly if you make her slow down. I know she has a little brown patch in her left eye.

But when I reached backward, things started going.

Her fourth birthday.

Fine. I could see it.

Her third.

Mostly fine.

Second.

Pieces.

The first time she walked?

June.

The first time she said Dad?

June.

The first time I held my daughter's hand while crossing a road?

June.

Every missing space had something in it.

I'd been calling it forgetting all morning, in my head, because forgetting was the least bad word I had. It wasn't forgetting.

I was replacing her.

Helen came home shortly after three without Maya. She'd taken her to her sister's. I was relieved enough that she noticed.

"I think we should stay there."

"Yeah."

"For a while."

"Yeah."

She sat opposite me. "What do you remember?"

I told her. She didn't cry. Helen gets practical when she's frightened. She got her phone out and started showing me photographs. Maya eating birthday cake. Maya asleep on my chest. Maya sitting inside a cardboard box we'd turned into a car.

I recognised every photograph. But some of them felt like photographs of things I'd been told about.

I know they're mine. They just don't feel like mine.

Helen put the phone face down on the coffee table.

"When you said June at dinner," she said, "I thought you had another kid somewhere."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"I spent all day wishing that's what it was."

We packed enough clothes for a week. Helen told me to leave everything else.

I went upstairs for my charger. On the way back down, I passed the narrow pane of glass beside the front door.

I had forgotten about it.

I saw number eighteen through it.

June was at the window.

She was up on her toes, I think. Only her head and shoulders showed above the sill.

A memory hit me so hard I dropped the charger.

I was kneeling beside a bathtub. June was maybe three. She had bubbles on her chin and was holding a plastic cup full of bathwater, trying to drink it while I told her, for what felt like the hundredth time, that bathwater was disgusting.

She laughed. I laughed.

The memory was warm. It wasn't frightening at all.

It felt exactly like loving my child.

I grabbed a jacket from the coat hook and covered the pane. Helen shouted from the car asking what I was doing. I told her nothing.

We stayed at her sister's last night.

Maya slept between us.

At about two in the morning I woke up because she'd kicked me in the stomach.

For a few seconds I didn't know who she was.

Not in some dramatic way.

I wasn't screaming.

I just woke up next to a small person and there was a blank space where recognition should have been.

Then it came back.

Maya.

My daughter.

I went into the bathroom and was sick.

She found me sitting on the floor afterward. Helen was still asleep. Maya sat beside me.

"You don't remember me?"

"I remember you."

"Some things."

I didn't answer.

She leaned against my arm. Then she started telling me.

Not about June. About us.

She reminded me about the time I dropped her birthday cake carrying it from the car. She reminded me that I used to call her Potato when she was a baby because she had no hair. She reminded me about a pigeon stealing half her sandwich at the zoo, and me chasing it because she wanted the sandwich back.

I remembered that one. Properly.

I laughed. She laughed too.

Then she said, "Remember when I hurt my chin?"

I tried.

School. Mrs Price. Hospital. I knew all of it. But when I reached for the memory, June was sitting on the kitchen counter in a yellow shirt.

Maya must have seen something in my face.

"That's mine," she said.

She's five. She didn't say it like something out of a horror film. She sounded annoyed.

Like June had taken one of her toys.

I hugged her.

I could remember a hundred times I'd hugged June. I couldn't remember holding Maya after she hurt her chin.

I carried her back to bed and lay down next to her and didn't sleep.

At some point I picked up my phone and checked the temperature. Four degrees. I'd been looking at it for a while before I understood why I wanted to know.

There's no power at number eighteen. There hasn't been for years. She's in a nightdress, and as far as I know nobody has ever fed her, or put a blanket over her, or argued with her about the hallway light.

I know how that sounds. I know she isn't a child, or isn't one in any way the word normally means. I don't know whether the memories I've got of her are real ones that belonged to somebody else or things she made up, and at three in the morning I couldn't find the part of me that thought it made a difference.

I lay there next to my daughter and worried about the other one.

I haven't told Helen.

We're not going home today.

Helen's brother is going to get the rest of our things. Work clothes, Helen's laptop, the bag of Maya's toys she keeps asking about, June's school bag. He thinks there's somebody squatting in number eighteen and that I've scared myself after seeing them.

Fine. He can think that.

I've told him not to look at the upstairs window. He laughed. I've told him again.

Maya has started making what she calls my Dad Book. It's printer paper stapled together. She draws pictures of things we've done and makes Helen write underneath because her spelling isn't great yet.

THE ZOO.

DADDY DROPPED MY CAKE.

MY FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL.

THE TIME I WAS SICK ON DADDY IN THE CAR.

Apparently that last one needed preserving.

There are seven pages so far. I remember five of them.

Helen asked me this morning whether I thought staying away would stop it.

I told her I haven't had a new memory of June since we left the house, which is true. I watched her decide to be relieved.

I didn't mention two o'clock. Nothing of June came in at two o'clock. Maya just wasn't there for a few seconds, and then she was. I've been telling myself all morning that it's a different thing, that it's tiredness and shock. I don't believe it enough to say it out loud.

She also asked why it was me and not Maya, when Maya had been waving at that window for two weeks.

I don't know. Maybe it was me waving back.

Helen's brother rang about an hour ago. He's got everything. He said he didn't see anyone, and that he'd only looked from the car anyway, just so he could tell me he had.

I wanted to ask him to go back and look properly. To see if she was all right.

I didn't.

Before he hung up he said, "Tell the girls I said hi."

He calls Helen and Maya the girls. I'm almost sure he always has.

Maya brought me another page while I was writing this.

It's a picture of the two of us standing in our old kitchen. I'm extremely tall and my hands come directly out of my shoulders. She told me it's the morning she started school.

Underneath, Helen has written:

Dad cried after I got out of the car but waited until I couldn't see him.

I told Maya I remembered.

She asked me what colour her backpack was.

Purple. I got that right.

Then she asked me what she'd said when I dropped her off.

I couldn't answer.

I remember June saying it.

I can see her standing beside a school gate in black shoes that hurt her heels, holding both straps of her backpack.

She looks back at me.

She smiles.

And she says, "Bye, Dad."

I don't know what Maya said.

She does. She won't tell me yet. She says I have to try to remember it myself.

So I've been trying.

I haven't got it. I've got the gate, and the shoes, and the way she held both straps. Every time I go back for it, that part is a bit clearer.

I'm going to keep trying.