Every glowing review on the listing was 'verified guest.' After my stay I found my own name on a five-star review I never wrote, dated before I arrived — and so, I realised, were all the others.
Every morning for a week after my sister died, the same three words appeared in the steam on my bathroom mirror as I showered — in her handwriting, which loops the way mine never has.
For months something in our flat threw things and slammed doors — until the week we decided, in private, to move out. Then it changed: it started, gently and unmistakably, helping us pack.
As a girl I had an 'imaginary' older sister I described in detail — name, freckles, a scar. My mother forbade the game. A DNA test at forty found her: a real half-sister, adopted out before I was born, matching my description.
A charity-shop wind-up radio only receives one thing: news bulletins from the day before. I laughed it off until it reported, yesterday-dated, an accident on my road — and I kept my son home from the school run.
Night shift on a modern motorway toll. A car paid with an old paper ticket from the original bridge — the one that collapsed, with cars on it, the year I was born. The driver thanked me by a name I've never used.
