The Test

Suki came up with the test.

"There is something only the real Priya would know," she said on Friday. "From before she moved away. Something we did that nobody else was there for."

"The shed," Jonah said immediately.

Suki nodded. The shed was at the bottom of Felix's garden and had been their base for two years, a cramped wooden space full of old garden tools and a moth-eaten rug they had dragged in themselves and a tin box buried under the floorboard in the corner where they kept important things: a list of rules they had written at age nine, two of Felix's trading cards, a note that Suki had written and never sent and would not explain, and a photograph of the four of them taken the summer before Priya left.

The photograph was the key. It had been taken by Jonah's mum on a disposable camera and only one copy existed. None of them had scanned it. Nobody outside the four of them knew it existed or what it showed.

"We tell her we found something in the shed," Jonah said. "We ask her if she remembers what we kept there."

"If she is Priya she will remember," Suki said.

"And if she is not?"

Suki looked at him steadily. "Then she will say something that sounds right but is not quite."

They did it that afternoon, casually, walking back from school in the four of them, Felix slightly ahead looking at his phone, Jonah saying to Priya: "Felix found something in the shed at the bottom of his garden. The old rug is still there."

Priya smiled. "I remember that shed," she said. "We used to go there all the time."

"Do you remember the tin box?" Suki asked. Her voice was perfectly even.

A very small pause. Perhaps half a second. Perhaps less.

"The tin box," Priya said. "Under the floorboard."

Jonah felt something cold move through him.

"What was in it?" he asked.

Another pause. Slightly longer.

"I do not remember exactly," Priya said. "It was a long time ago." She smiled again. "Why? Is it still there?"

"Some of it," Jonah said.

They walked the rest of the way in a conversation about something else entirely, a television programme Felix had been watching, and Priya joined in and laughed at the right moments and everything was normal on the surface in the way that water looks still before you put your hand in and feel the current underneath.

That evening Jonah and Suki had a very long phone call.

"She knew about the tin box," Suki said.

"She knew it was under the floorboard," Jonah said. "Not just that it existed. Where it was."

"But she did not know what was inside," Suki said.

"She said she did not remember," Jonah said. "But what if she genuinely did not know? What if she knows everything Priya knew about the shed from the outside but not what was inside? Things she never saw?"

The line was very quiet for a moment.

"What are you saying?" Suki said.

"I do not know," Jonah said. "I genuinely do not know. But I think we need to tell Felix."