Carol looked out the window at the home she had tried to make for Sophia while she was married to Ed. It made her weird to look at it now. They both went to sleep in each others arms last night after making love to each other. Waking up cuddling and lying around deciding to stop not talking about the thing they were not not talking about.

'I can do it,' Carol took the key.

They half argued the whole way there because Carol didn't want him to come into the house and see what she had lived like with Ed before she left. She didn't know what sort of state it would be in now. She was to embarrassed that he was going to see it.

'You don't have to go in there alone,' he told her.

'I want to, I don't want you going in with me,' Carol told him. All of a sudden she was embarrassed for him to see where she used to live, she knew it would be a mess or smell or worse there would still be blood stains on the floor from months ago, from the night before she left him for good. Daryl watched her face as all the emotions run across it.

'You know I don't care right, I just want to be there with you, support you though this,' Daryl told her, 'How about I stand outside while you go in, I'm not staying in the car.'

'I want to, I want to do it alone,' she whispered.

'But your not alone, we're not alone not anymore, we are a team,' Daryl was out of the car moving around to open her door and held out his hand, holding it the whole way up the path, She unlocked the door and went in and looked around.

Daryl counted to 20 before following her into the house. It was as bad as he expected not worse than what he thought, you could see that it used to be clean and a women lived there, but there was sticky tacky stuff on every surface now, cobwebs and it was dusty. He moved around opening windows and pulling open curtain. He followed Carol down the hall opening the door to Sophia's bedroom.

He'd left it untouched, her bed was made, of all the house this was the one you expected a little girl to come back too. Compared to what she had now with Daryl everything looked cheap and tacky, Carol had brought everything second hand and tried to make it cheerful as possible. Daryl went back out to the car to get the packing boxes to put stuff into that she wanted to keep. Then they were getting the rest pulled out thrown away or taken to the needy. Then Daryl decided that he was paying commercial cleaners to clean it and do the gardens so Carol could get the best price possible for her house.

Carol was wandering around the house touching stuff and looking at things, there was one room she didn't go into, Daryl could only assume it was their bedroom, however he did discover big locks inside the bedroom door of the spare room and Sophia's room.

Daryl opened up the packing boxes in the lounge and had a stack of bubble wrap and newspaper to wrap the stuff she wanted to keep, she'd told him she had some stuff that used to belong to her parents she kept. She come out to him holding a wedding album for him to wrap to put in the box.

'My parents,' She told him, he flicked it open, looking through the photos and the photos that were tucked in over the years of them together they looked different to his parents they seemed to look like they liked each other.

'They look happy?' he asked.

'They were, Dad was... he wasn't around when I married Ed, he'd died by then, my mum died when Sophia was a baby and then, I guess I was stuck, they were happy. They used to giggle and have jokes,' Carol said, 'When I used to sneak in late at night I could hear them, ... you know... even at the age they were they were still into each other.'

'Do you think you stop at a certain age?' Daryl asked.

'I don't know but it seemed to be every night when I was 18, I used to sleep with a pillow over my head,' She smiled when Daryl looked shocked.

'Every night?'

'Well maybe not every night, kids memories are faded sometimes,' Carol giggled. He wrapped the photo album and followed her through the house as she collected different things that she had a story for.

Daryl opened the door to the main bedroom, pushing it open and looking around, he saw what she didn't want him to see, her stuff was destroyed and ripped, blood on the walls and holes in the walls, Carol pulled him out by the back of his shirt, and shut the door.

'There is nothing I want in there there never was,' she told him. She pulled down the cord to go up into the attic to see if her stuff was still there left untouched. Ed being the man he was it was unlikely he stopped drinking long enough to go find more of her stuff that wasn't directly in her site. He hadn't bothered with Sophia's stuff it was unlikely he would bother with going up into the dusty attic to find more of her things. Carol had hidden her important stuff she couldn't fit in different locations around the house so if he found something he didn't find it all.