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becoming a naval officer, thereby earning his right to be by her side.
    But Harry didn’t have Corinne’s privileged upbringing or education and he had been destined to fail. When he finally accepted that his ambitions would never be realized, he had broken off their unofficial engagement, as evidenced by a fraught letter from a heartbroken Corinne pleading for him to reconsider. More begging letters followed, apparently unanswered, and then in 1966 the inevitable happened. Corinne wrote to tell Harry that she was marrying someone else. And then the letters stopped.
    Silence had descended in the kitchen. The aftermath of the rain trickled down the window in lazy droplets and the indicator on the washing machine flashed impatiently to be emptied. Elle paid her surroundings no heed; she was engrossed in a past in which she had played no part. It felt odd to discover that her dad’s heart had remained bruised and battered for almost ten years until he fell in love and married Anne in 1975. As she carefully stacked up the envelopes again, she wished that she had left them undisturbed after all. She added to the pile the tattered receipts and tickets that had been in the box too, keepsakes that she hadn’t even tried to decipher. She had invaded her dad’s privacy enough as it was.
    Elle stood up and stretched, walked over to a cupboard and took out her sewing basket. She found a reel of thin red ribbon and was cutting a piece long enough to tie up the letters when her hand froze mid-action, the jaws of the scissors opened wide. Her hand swayed as the image of something she had just seen registered in her mind. It was a date stamped in faded blue ink. She rushed back to the table, scrambling for the ticket that had become imprinted on her memory. It was for the Empire Theatre to see some musical or other, but the show was of little importance. It was the date that concentrated her mind: 1984.

6
    Elle tried telling herself that the keepsakes hidden away with the letters were a sweet and innocent remnant of her parents’ long and happy marriage. The half-dozen receipts and tickets were all dated between 1982 and 1985, and she would have been in primary school around that time. She reasoned that romantic outings for the two of them – the two being her mum and her dad – would have been worth remembering, wouldn’t they?
    The theory was plausible but it didn’t put her mind at ease, not when they had been kept together with such outpourings of love from another woman. There were so many questions unanswered and no one left to answer them, but it didn’t stop her trying. She carefully inspected every item that remained in the rusted metal box. The assortment of old coins and key rings offered up no more clues, so she turned her attention to the box she had filled with mementos from her parents’ house but to no avail. She would have to continue the search elsewhere.
    As luck would have it, Rick had arranged for her to meet someone from the clearance company at the house the next day. While she was there, she was determined to go through every scrap of paper she could find.
    â€˜I’m afraid there isn’t much of a market these days for this kind of furniture,’ the rep from the clearance company was telling her as he opened the creaking wardrobe door. They were standing in her parents’ bedroom. The dark wood bedroom suite had been there for as long as Elle could remember.
    â€˜I think it was a wedding present for my grandmother and then passed down through the family,’ Elle said, annoyed that yet another person had cast a glance over her family’s life and judged it worthless.
    Tony scratched his head and gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘It’s hard coming into someone else’s home and having to put a value to it,’ he said, ‘but I have to set sentimentality to one side and decide what’s worth reselling and what will be stripped down or