Florence moved into the room, the thick blue carpet swaying like the deck of a ship. Or maybe it was her who was swaying.

The room was roughly the same size as her own – square, the blue-skies-with-occasional-decorative-clouds wallpaper peeling from the corners.

The bed was pushed up against the far wall, blue-and-white striped cover unmade as if someone had just been lying there, but covered in a layer of moulding dust. The drawers of the chest next to it hung out, the clothes inside screwed up. Florence poked through them: lots of earthy colours.

On top of the chest of drawers ten or so books were placed neatly, though there were gaps as if someone had pulled out certain titles. The ones that remained were mildewed adventure books, and Florence merely gave them a once over before turning to the wardrobe.

Its doors hung open, clothes and hangers littering the floor, and confirming once again that whoever lived here (Florence carefully skirted around the word ‘brother’ in her thoughts) liked dark colours.

The only other big piece of furniture in the room was an upright desk, squashed in the corner at the end of the bed. Little clouds of dust puffed up from the carpet as Florence stumbled over.

More books and photos – some framed, some tacked on – cluttered the built-in shelves above the desk; she averted her eyes, instead focusing on the mess that covered the table: a jumble of textbooks – for A Level maths, physics and PE – A4 binders and car magazines.

Leafing through the former revealed half-done past exams and pages and pages of revision notes in a scrawling hand Florence struggled to read. Did this person want to be a doctor? The latter were easier to decode – a mixture of Autocar and Car magazines with splashy headlines and glossy covers, the corners rolling up from the number of times they’d been flipped through. Florence thumbed through them, the clunky shapes of the older models funny to her eyes. How old were these, exactly? She scoured the front page before finding the tiny date above the barcode: March 2013 all the way through to May. Almost five years old. She placed them down.

A tingling feeling rose inside Florence. Maybe it had something to do with what happened yesterday, or finding a third bedroom, or that all the little details made it harder to ignore that a person had lived here. A real person with likes and interests and who neither she nor her parents had any recollection of. And dancing around the corner of her eye were the photographs pinned to the bookshelf.

Florence scrunched her eyes shut and took a deep breath, holding it inside like she did before a performance. She breathed out. But the same magical calming effect didn’t happen. She tried again. Nothing – except the disturbed dust got in her nose. Her eyes snapped open and she coughed until her lungs almost came up.

“The room wants to kill me!” She thumped her chest, letting out pitiful half-coughs, hemming and hawing. But she was alone, and there was no one to appreciate her performance. Or stop her. Unwillingly, she turned back to the desk and raised her eyes to the bookshelf.

The boy in the photos had the same sun-kissed, olive tone skin Florence had inherited from her mother, and he towered over his companions in a thin, stick-like way. His short hair – buzzed at the sides, longer on top – gelled into a quiff exposed his handsome, sunny face and infectious smile – the same as her father.

Her eyes darted from photo to photo. In one he was celebrating, grinning at the camera, with a group of boys, all of them holding sheets of paper aloft, the school in the background: GCSE results day. In another he was posed by a familiar black Audi A7, a pair of sunglasses perched on his nose and his arms crossed; he was slightly taller than the Outsider beside him. An awkward tween, holding up a certificate; a young boy in his first pair of tap shoes in the living room, chest puffed out; a twelve-year-old trying to be cool for his first disco; a blushing young man in a suit with a girl on his arm going to the year 11 dance…

Florence stared at each moment from the teenager’s life, her chest constricting until her eyes landed on one photo. She forgot to breathe.

The photo had been taken outside the community centre. Her mother beamed proudly on the left gazing at the teenage boy in a striped shirt carrying a young girl in a leotard and white tights on his back. The girl waved a medal at the camera, her face alight with joy.

Florence knew that medal. She still had it, hanging in her room.

The walls began to spin. She slumped to the ground, pulling her knees up to her chest and burying her face. Her mind was in free-fall. She had plunged through a hole in reality and now there was nothing to hold on to, and nothing to pull her back.

She had a brother.

A brother she didn’t remember. That no one remembered. And yet, he had existed. Here, in this room, and at school, and in tap class: a real, living human who had vanished, not just from her memory, but from her parents’ and the village’s.

For a moment the implications were too much for Florence to take in.

“No, this is a joke.” Her head snapped up and she stared around the room.

This was a hoax – not her parents – her parents wouldn't do this – someone else must have been into their house and arranged this.

Even if – if – she had a brother, there would still be other stuff... like the family photographs!

She got to her feet, trembling so much she almost fell. The ground seemed to be a giant sponge – her steps were as light as air but the ground sucked away her energy.

It took an aeon to get to the stairs. She clutched the banister, shuffling down until she reached the first of the family photos.

Nothing had changed.

Florence let out a sigh of relief. Feeling began to spread through her numb legs and the ache from her hand tightly clenching the banister pulsed. Their family of three, not four, smiled out of the photos – picnicking, dancing, celebrating Christmas. Each memory was crystal-clear. And brotherless.

But as she looked at each one, they began to change. Colours and lines distorted and melded together; like a heat-haze that suddenly disappeared, a fourth figure took shape on the glossy snapshots.

Florence’s foot slipped on the stair. She fell backwards, banging into the banister and rebounding off before falling sideways. Her elbow and knees connected painfully with the edge of the stairs and she thumped to the floor.

She lay there, letting the pain sink in. An embarrassing urge to cry arose within her. This wasn’t the worst that had happened to her – she’d sprained her ankle and torn her calf dancing, and broken her arm after one of Elliot’s ill-advised adventures – but lying there, she wanted her mum or dad to pick her up and give her a cuddle and tell her everything was okay. The corners of her eyes stung; she blinked.

After a long time, she pulled herself together. Hauling herself to her feet, she shook out her legs, making sure nothing was hurting – it wasn’t - then slowly descended the stairs. With each step she paused and looked at the photographs hanging on the wall, and in each of them she saw her brother, sometimes younger, sometimes older.

She went around the whole house.

The traces of her brother were light; a spare mug that nobody ever used; an extra placemat in the dining room drawer; a commemorative magnet on the fridge from the graduating class of 2011; the slowly deflating football and spikes in the corner of the utility. In every room she found something that her eyes had seen but not registered, glanced over like light reflecting off water. Each one was a stake driven into her heart.

She returned to his room and sat in the middle of the floor, staring around, her mind numb.

Time ebbed by.

Without the natural light from the window Florence had no idea exactly how much time had passed. How many hours she had known about her brother. Like the waters from a raging flood that slowly subsided, the idea leached into her mind, working its way down until it hit the bedrock of her world and merged, painfully, wearily, into it.

Benjamin Slater.

It was sometime in the afternoon, Florence was pretty sure. She’d been picking through her brother’s room when she found his name written in the upper left hand-corner inside the binders. And again on the past exam papers, written in a lazy, crabbed manner that spoke to the writer’s impatience. He was called Benjamin Slater.

Florence pulled out the desk chair and dropped down. What had happened to the boy who’d written those words?

“Flooooorence!” Elliot’s call was accompanied by a thumping on the door as if the doorbell was an invention he disdained to use.

She jumped up out of the chair, her heart beating ten to the dozen. Stumbling down the stairs, she cracked the front door open. A gust of cold, damp air tunnelled in. “What is it?”

Elliot observed her, his hands in his pockets and a big woollen scarf covering the lower half of his face. He frowned, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” She rubbed her tired eyes, “What’s up?”

His frown deepened, and there was a hint of reproach in his voice, “Haven’t you been keeping track of the time? It’s two o’clock.”

“...Right! Yes, okay. Give me a minute.” She stood back. “Come in. I’ll be right back down.”

She went back upstairs, first to the bathroom where she washed her face. The water was so cold it made her gasp, but it drove the unreal feeling from her body. In her bedroom she threw on a jumper and coat then thundered down the stairs, pulling up just short of knocking into Elliot. Throwing her trainers out from the basket of jumbled shoes and forcing her feet into them, she turned to him, “Right. I’m ready.”

“...Okay.” He opened the door and strode out down the front path without looking back.

They walked out of the estate in silence, turning left at the main road and retracing their footsteps from last Sunday, and the Sunday before that, and the one before that as they crossed Mayker’s field.

The rain had worsened the already existing muddy patches into ankle-deep sludge they had to skirt around and created new puddles that flooded the path. Water speckled their clothes from the grass-covered tussocks, and in the holly bushes lining the field to their left, a robin kept them company, flying from branch to branch and chirruping. Still, they proceeded in silence.

Words, speech, failed Florence. Before and Now were two separate times, divided by the unassailable knowledge that she had a brother. Whatever they’d talked about before was utterly beyond her grasp.

She stared at the back of Elliot’s head framed against the backdrop of pine trees and the Wall. What would happen if she told him she had a brother? Maybe he would laugh and say she was crazy – like the Outsiders. That was what her parents would say. Maybe he would listen carefully then report her to the school’s counsellor on Monday.

She pursed her lips.

None of those seemed very Elliot-like.

“Hey, Elliot.”

He turned. Not just a twist of the head but a full body turn, facing her directly. The heavy water vapour in the air obscured the distance, trapping them in a moveable prison.

She licked her lips. “What would you do... if I told you I had a brother?”

His reaction was beyond her prediction. He neither accused her of being crazy nor shrugged her off. Instead, he looked at her with a steady, probing gaze, as if trying to find the joke or prank. She bit the inside of her mouth. Sometimes Elliot intimidated her more than even Mr. Ackley on a lifestyle spiel.

“If you told me you had a brother,” Elliot said, still watching her intently, “I’d believe you, Flower.”

Elliot’s words entered her ears as English but something seemed to interrupt their transmission to her brain. “What?”

“I’d believe you.”

“Really? But, why?” Her hand twitched, brushing against a hard rush which sent a deluge of water down onto her trainers.

“So you have a brother?”

The robin in the branches of the holly let out a keening trill, its red breast fluttering.

Florence hesitated, then nodded, “Well, yes, I think so. I mean, I do. Or did.”

“I see. And you don’t remember him, right?”

“No! Neither... neither do my parents.” A crazy thought occurred to her. “Do you remember him?” The small hope that ignited within her – of getting proof, not just in the realm of things, but of memories – died when Elliot shook his head. “Then why...?”

“Because I had an uncle. And nobody remembers him, either.”