Fiona Harper - The Memory Collector - The emotional and uplifting new novel from the bestselling author of The Other Us

Heather’s stomach has been sinking ever since the man started talking about babies. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want to feel this rush of empathy for the woman, to share in her pain for the child that will be forever missing from her life, so when the mother has a meltdown because someone wants to throw away a ratty baby blanket covered in cobwebs and mouse droppings, Heather grabs at the opportunity to turn the warm feeling sour.

‘You have a child!’ she shouts at the screen. ‘You have one left that didn’t die and you’re losing her in a pile of junk! Why don’t you think of her for a change? Think about what this is doing to her?’

It feels strangely good to hurl the words at these stupid people who can’t hear her, people who are flushing their lives down the toilet and won’t get off their sorry backsides to do anything about it. So instead of switching over, she suspends her disbelief as the house is cleared and the families are shown happy and smiling at the end of the episode, and she watches the episode after that too. Apparently, the channel is having a bit of a marathon this weekend.

The next one features an older lady who started hoarding after her beloved father died, and a waste-of-space woman who can’t see that seventy cats in one cluttered house is too many. Heather shouts at her, too. Why not? There’s no one here to see, and she’s really starting to enjoy herself. It’s two in the morning before she crawls into bed.

She lies there, her duvet tucked neatly under her arms and her pillows arranged just so under her head, and she stares at the high ceiling of her bedroom. As much as she doesn’t want to, she can’t stop thinking about those people on the television, particularly that baby.

That was the common thread in a lot of cases, wasn’t it? Loss. At least five of the eight people in the episodes she watched had lost someone, either through death or divorce, even children being given up for adoption. Someone had been taken away from them, without them expecting it and without their permission, and to fill the hole they’d started to shop and store and collect.

Is that what her mother had done? If you’d have asked Heather a month ago what her mother could have lost that would make her start behaving that way, she would have shaken her head and said there was nothing, no rhyme or reason to it. But now she knows better.

It was me, she thinks. The thing she lost was me. But somehow, even though she came back, her mother behaved as if Heather had never returned and she never threw another thing away for the rest of her life.

Heather thinks of the photo she gave to Faith for Alice, of how everything looked normal and clean. Christmas 1991. Only seven months before the date on the newspaper report. Is that the key, then? Is her being ‘snatched’ what started it all?

She closes her eyes, not so much to welcome sleep but because she’s stemming the tears that are pooling there, and lets out a long, ragged sigh.

Even when she was little, she’d always been afraid, from the way her mother talked to her, sometimes even the way she looked at her, that maybe everything had been her fault. Now she knows she was right.

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