Charlotte Buchanan, 20 Jul '12

It was some time later that he called me. He was getting ready to move somewhere smaller, which I knew, and he'd found some photos in a drawer - would I like them? I already knew the ones he meant: orange kagools, birthday parties, she and I posing by enormous pots on Greek islands, all slightly grainy, badly-coloured efforts that my - our - parents had once excitedly waited weeks for.

When I got to her old house, where of course he still lived, alone now, I suddenly realised I hadn't given any thought to this at all. I'd been thinking about my sister, gone now, about the photographs, but not about what I was going to say to her husband, struggling through the piles of her stuff, dealing with his own grief, trying to get used to living on his own again. It was different for me: I missed her, naturally, but we hadnt been particularly close. We hadn't lived under the same roof for over a decade. I didn't know that going to her house was going to change that.

He opened the door and gave me a smile he obviously didn't feel. The place was a state. Piles of paper in the hall at the mercy of every breath, once-lovely clothes looking nasty now in bin bags too full to tie.

"They're in here."

We went into the sitting room. The desk where the photos were was behind the sofa; I squeezed myself in by the open drawer and took up an uncomfortable kneeling position as I went through the yellow Kodak packets. Deciphering my mother's handwriting, trying to control the sliding strips of negatives, the pictures took me through my childhood with my sister. Holding hands at Stonehenge - I realised I could remember what her hand felt like in mine. I missed her again, the grief I had though mellowed now as keen as at first, not just for the people in her sitting room now, left behind, but for all the things she never had time on earth to do.

Her husband was going through her books. He threw a Selected Keats over to me.

"Want this one?"

To my sister, with all someone else's love, Christmas 1997. I could see why he didn't want it.

"Hm. Y'p. Thanks." It fitted in my handbag.

I put the photographs in the shopping bag I'd brought with me and got to my feet. My brother in law looked up at me. He was crying in that damp, red-eyed, tearless way that men have.

"I'll give you a hand with those books," I said, wanting to be useful, not wanting to leave him alone, wanting to share in our loss.

"She loved this one," he said fondly.

"I gave that to her," I replied. "Look in the cover."

He smiled properly now. "So you did."

"You don't have to move house, you know," I said.

"I need to. I want to." He was lying. I put my arm round him.

My sister's things, there without her. Grieving together now, he put his arms round me haphazardly like I were a floating beam of a broken ship and he a stricken sailor. Then somehow we changed position and I kissed him, desire born of sadness - is not grief as valid as love? He kissed me back.

There seemed nothing wrong in being with my sister's husband. No one who wasn't in the house that day could have understood but we did. The need for closeness, for comfort, we'd come together in sorrow and now we did so again, body and soul.

His lips had made a little mark on me, just above my left breast. I only noticed it when I undressed again for bed that night.

When it was over, we sat together on the floor. Whatever needed to happen had happened. I held both of his hands.

"Are you going to be all right?"

"Think so. Thanks."

"That's OK. Thank you too." We exchanged shy smiles.

"Do you want a hand with the photos?"

"It's fine - it's only one bag."

And we said goodbye.

They held a memorial for her in the autumn. He was there, suit, new glasses, I noticed. He smelled the same and I probably did too but neither of us mentioned the encounter at his house with the photographs on that summer's afternoon. Memories are precious but the past is not for us to resurrect.