The Woman Who Returned My Life

How it begins

The first box contained a sofa cushion from a sofa Helen Price had never bought.

She knew the fabric immediately. Twenty years earlier she had carried its sample in her handbag for a month, convinced it belonged to the life she was about to begin.

The life had not begun. She had married someone else, moved somewhere else and chosen a sofa that survived children, pets and a less dramatic shade of blue.

Now the rejected cushion lay in her hall wrapped in tissue.

James Ward stood beside the delivery trolley with a tablet and an increasingly uncomfortable expression.

'It says Mrs Price.'

'That is my name.'

'Then perhaps a gift.'

She opened the next box. Inside stood six champagne glasses bearing the initials she would have had if she had married the other man.

Helen put the lid down.

James stopped looking at his tablet.

'You didn't order any of this.'

'No.'

He read the packing label again. She watched him recognize something and wish he had not.

'That code,' she said.

'It's an old warehouse location.'

'How old?'

'Closed before I started.'

Outside, the removals van blocked half the street. A neighbor waved impatiently from a car. Helen almost apologized, then realized how absurd it was to feel responsible for a life she had not even lived.

She opened a smaller parcel. A framed photograph showed a dining room arranged around the same blue fabric. No people. On the table lay a letter addressed to her.

James took one step back, giving her room.

Helen unfolded it. The handwriting belonged to nobody she recognized.

This is what you lost, it said.

From the kitchen came the rattle of the old kettle her husband kept meaning to replace. For the first time in years, its familiar imperfection sounded like something somebody else might be trying to take away.