I think my granddaughter believes we were actually grey-skinned, with dull hair, always posing in a shadowed landscape. But I remember the town as being almost too bright to look at when I was a girl. I remember the deep blue of the sky and the dark green of the pines cutting through it, the bright red of the local brick houses and the orange carpet of pine needles under our feet. Nowadays – though I’m sure the sky is still occasionally blue and most of the houses are still there, and the trees still drop their needles – nowadays, the colours seem faded, as if I live in an old photograph.
An 82-year-old woman, cared for largely by her daughter, whose memory is failing becomes convinced that her friend Elizabeth is missing and proceeds to search for her, her memories becoming entwined with another disappearance in 1946, seventy years earlier: that of her sister. Eventually, it turns out that her friend has had a stroke and is in hospital, and her sister's remains are in her friend's garden presumably left there though how they came to be there is unclear. It is possible though that her sister was killed by the man she'd married, the man who'd helped plant the garden where the remains were found.