My sister kissed my husband in front of thirty people at her own anniversary party and called it a joke. Her husband had a wrapped present in his hands and an envelope she had never opened.

And the last thing.

The box.

The cream one with the ribbon. It was not bought for the memory card.

Tobin had bought her a present in the January, months before he found the receipt, for their first anniversary. It had been in a wardrobe at Harrow Rise since the sixth of February.

It was an album.

He had made it himself, which is why it took him from the November, and it is sixty-one pages, one spread for every month they had known each other, with the tickets and the photographs and the thing she wrote on a napkin in 2022.

When he found the receipt in the March, he did not throw it away.

He took the album out of that box, put it back in the wardrobe, and put a photograph and a memory card in the box instead — and then he tied the ribbon back exactly as it had been, and he carried it round for eleven weeks waiting for a moment.