After an hour-long expedition to her flat and back to collect a year's worth of forgotten memories, Sunny is back on Viv's sofa – the blue one – with a stack of books and CDs and photographs and scrawled-in notebooks, and she isn't alone. Delilah is lying across the pale yellow sofa with a thick blanket over her legs and a cat on her stomach. The minute Delilah arrived, Britney wrapped herself around her legs and purred her raucous contentment – she is an impeccable judge of character, instantly understanding that Delilah is safe.

Sunny picks up a wallet full of glossy photos, the kind from a disposable camera that has to be taken to the chemist to get the pictures printed, only then revealing the quality of the 27 photos inside. More than 27, actually. There's more than one camera's worth of photos in here. They're stamped on the back with the date they were printed – the 9th of September, 1999 – and there's only one blurry disaster, like the picture was taken while the camera-holder was falling down a flight of stairs.

But the rest? The rest show Sunny and her friends posing together, laughing together, lying on the beach in the hot August sun; there's one of Viv pulling a goofy face in the sea, the water knee-high. In another, Viv is topless, lying face down on a towel, and Sunny is straddling her back with a tube of suncream in her hand and a wicked grin aimed at whoever is holding the camera.

There is nothing out of the ordinary in any of the pictures. A lot of them are poorly framed or on the cusp of overexposed. But they are snapshots of a life, glimpses into the year that Sunny forgot. She swallows down a lump in her throat as she flips through a summer of fun, a summer filled with beach days and picnics in the park, and—

The lump doubles in size when the scenery changes and it takes a moment before Sunny pieces together the buildings and the bridges and realises that the background of this picture of her with her parents is New York. The retirement celebration trip. There they are on the Brooklyn Bridge. There they are at the top of the Empire State Building. There they are at the twin towers; in Central Park; on the Staten Island Ferry; hitting all the tourist spots with camera-ready grins.

"Oh my gosh, this is so cute," Delilah says, one hand on the cat, the other holding a photo Sunny dropped. It's one of her mothers on the ferry with their backs to Manhattan, the wind whipping their hair into a storm. Martha's arm is around Sylvia's waist; Sylvia's arm is around Martha's shoulders. Their heads are nearly touching. Sylvia is looking out past the camera, but Martha's eyes are fixed on her wife.

Delilah hands the photo to Sunny and says, "Your mums are goals. This ... this is what I want."

Sunny takes the picture and flips it over, and it jars her to see her own writing on the back in pale pencil grey. I'll have what they're having! Note to self – check if Viv looks at me the way Mum looks at Mum. She laughs and shows it to Delilah, who gives her a knowing smile.

"She does, by the way," she says. Without disturbing Britney, she finds another pile of pictures that she rifles through until she finds the one she's looking for – one of Sunny and Viv in a not too dissimilar position: arms around each other's waists, standing on a blustery, autumnal hill at sunset. Sunny is grinning at the camera, but Viv is looking at Sunny. It's the same look Martha gave Sylvia. The kind of look that says you are my world; I only have to look at you to smile.

"Damn," Sunny murmurs. She knows Viv loves her, she has heard it so many times in the last couple of weeks and it makes her glow every time, but here, she really sees it. Sees the adoration in Viv's eyes and the light in her smile. "Who took this?"

"Me. Fraser wanted some inspiration for an autumn exhibition he was doing so we all went for a walk up Black Hill. I think it was the middle of October, so the leaves were changing and the conkers were out, and you two were looking incredibly photogenic."

She isn't wrong. Sunny's in a brown leather jacket that must be Viv's and army-green shorts, a combination that shouldn't look good and yet it does, against the backdrop of horse chestnut trees and a deep orange sky. Viv is in moss-green dungarees, her thick curls the same colour as the conkers in Sunny's hand, the pair of them the personification of autumn.

Delilah sighs. "That's what I want."

"My sexy shorts?" Sunny asks. She doesn't recognise them. If past her has any sense, she's donated them to charity by now. "Or my sexy girlfriend?"

"Your relationship in general," Delilah says.

"Be patient. If Ionie's as great as you make her sound, you'll be there in no time."

It hasn't been long since Delilah went on her first date with Ionie but there have already been two more, because when Delilah Jackson likes a girl, she doesn't mess around. At this rate, they'll be getting matching tattoos by the end of the week.

"I really like her," she says quietly, her eyes on Britney. "I don't want to scare her off but oh my goodness, Sunny, she's so pretty I feel like I'm going to combust every time she looks at me. I turn into a doe-eyed, tongue-tied goose."

Sunny laughs, setting the photos aside, and pulls her socked feet up onto the sofa, wrapping her hands around her toes. "You have a fucking astrophysics degree, Lilah. Your brain is capable of things mere mortals can't even understand. Surely you can hold it together in front of a pretty girl."

Delilah widens her eyes and shakes her head. "I can't, Sunny. I really can't. Pretty girls are my kryptonite."

Sunny scoffs. "It's a wonder you don't combust in front of me every day, then."

Delilah laughs and reaches out to pat Sunny's knee. "You are beautiful, my wonderful friend, but I love you far too much to lust after you. Ionie, on the other hand..." She trails off with another heavy sigh. "The things I imagine her doing to me."

"Kinky."

Delilah flits her eyes at Sunny and her lips twitch, concealing a grin. She makes a show of admiring her nails, freshly manicured and trimmed short. "We'll see. She's coming over tonight, so..."

"Are you two planning on shagging already?" Sunny guffaws. There is no judgement from her, just surprise. She cannot imagine sleeping with someone she's known for a handful of days. She still can't really imagine sleeping with Viv.

"Tennyson, darling," Delilah says, in a near flawless imitation of Sunny's mother. It's a bit creepy. "We're not shagging. That's such a horrible word. We're ... creating art with our bodies."

"Oh my god, you've already shagged?"

Delilah rolls her eyes and strokes Britney's head. "She's so crass, isn't she?"

"Delilah Jackson!" Sunny shoots up from her seat, spreading the debris of a year all over the place. "You didn't tell me you fucked! That's a big fucking deal. How was it?"

"She has the hands of a goddess and the tongue of a deity and good god, she is the queen of orgasms."

"Seriously?"

Britney stretches and arches her back and moves from Delilah to the other end of the sofa. Delilah sits up and brushes cat hair off her jumper, and fixes Sunny with a serious look. "I caught a glimpse of a higher level of existence. She gave life new meaning. I floated amidst the stars and saw the universe for what it really is."

Sunny doesn't know what to say.

"She made me come so. Fucking. Hard," Delilah adds, "and I think I am genuinely in love with her, but it could be that I'm in love with how she made me feel?"

"And you've known her all of, what, a week?"

Delilah pulls her lips between her teeth. "More like, uh, four days."

"Fucking hell. How long until you're living together?"

Pursing her lips, she says, "Oh, at least another four days."

"As long as I get to meet her first."

"Don't worry, I won't propose until I have your explicit approval."

"Okay, good."

"Just so you know, you and Viv already have my explicit approval to propose. So, whenever you want to lock her down, don't waste a minute."

*

The weather is doing something strange, caught between sunshine and rain. The sky holds the threat of a downpour but so far none has come, the sun powering through to shine warm yellows rays between the gaps in the clouds. The wind isn't holding back, though. The bushy green trees in the crescent outside Viv's bay window are leaning, handfuls of their leaves succumbing to the gusts that roil off the sea and whip through the branches.

Delilah spent last night at her parents' house in Leeds and she has brought leftovers from the dinner her father cooked, brown stew chicken and pepper pot soup, which are heating up on the stove and filling the flat with the most mouth-watering aromas. Leroy Jackson is a master in the kitchen – Sunny hadn't been much of a fish person until she tried his Jamaican rundown a few years ago and learnt that it was flavour she'd been missing.

She's glad to be inside with a warm mug in her hand, one of her forgotten CDs blasting from Viv's stereo. They're four tracks deep into S Club 7's debut album and Sunny finds herself dancing along to S Club Party, shaking her hips and almost spilling her coffee when she waves her hands in her air like she just doesn't care.

"Okay, this is a bop," she says, singing along with the predictable chorus when it comes around for a third time. "Oh, we've got a total unnecessary key change!" she cries out with glee. She loves and hates it in equal measure when songs shift up a key right at the end. It is not the first time she's heard it on this album already, and after listening to the entirety of Westlife's debut album and Backstreet Boys' third album this morning, she's come to expect it.

"Your taste in music leaves a lot to be desired," Delilah mutters, sifting through the CDs to find something she deems more palatable. "Can we have this instead, please? I've had enough of pop groups for one year." She waves a case at Sunny, who grabs it without looking and then gasps when she realises it's a David Bowie album.

"Oh my god! New Bowie?"

"Not his best, but better than this caterwauling." Delilah grimaces at the opening beats of Everybody Wants You, until the music is cut off by Sunny popping open the disc tray and switching S Club 7's first album for Bowie's twenty-first.

Britney may be Sunny's current obsession, but Bowie is her ride or die.

"Nothing will ever beat the live show, anyway," Delilah says.

Sunny stops in her tracks. Her jaw drops. "You've seen him live?"

Delilah's eyebrows jump up, and then her face collapses in sorrow when she says, "Oh, Sunny."

And Sunny knows that voice. She knows that this is another memory lost to the void. "I saw him live? Where? Did we go to London or something?" she asks, because there's no way the master behind Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust came to Black Sands.

Delilah chews on her lip, discomfort written into every pore. "We went to Paris," she says, and Sunny chokes. She has been to Paris. She has seen David Bowie live in concert. And she has forgotten every moment of it all. "We were in London – you, me, and the boys – for a few days in October and Ravi heard that Bowie was going to be playing at the Elysée Montmartre, and the Eurostar was right there so we were all like, fuck it. Let's go to Paris. It was incredible. He walked on stage and launched straight into Life On Mars and oh, god, the chills."

"Fuck," Sunny whispers. She drops onto the sofa and massages her temples. Each time she thinks she's okay with all this, something else jumps out of the woodwork and pulls her back to the dank reality of earth.

"I'm sorry, Sunny." Delilah's voice is caught on a breath. "Shit, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have sa—"

"No, you should." Sunny huffs out a breath, drags her hands over her face and through her hair, and paints on a smile. "I want to know everything I missed. It just sucks to hear about some of it. For fuck's sake, why did I do all the cool stuff the one year that got stolen by the black hole?"

"Well, you know what that means? There's really only one answer."

"What?"

"You have to make the rest of your years equally as awesome, if not more so. So what, you missed Bowie in Paris? He'll do other concerts. Maybe you'll catch him in LA one day. And New York, Schmoo York. You can go again."

Sunny's about to protest that, chances are, she won't be able to afford to go again. But then she remembers her pay rise, and she thinks about moving in with Viv, which will probably cut her rent in half, and who gives a fuck about savings? She could die tomorrow; she could be snapped back to 1999 or thrown forward to 2019, so she might as well do her living while she can. The thought of ending up like Margaret or Isabel is enough to send a chill down her spine.

They take a break from reminiscing to eat lunch, filling their bowls and their stomachs with Leroy's hearty food. The aromatic spice warms Sunny from the inside out, the meat so tender it falls apart in her mouth, her eyes watering and her tongue burning at the punch of the Scotch Bonnet pepper that doesn't even make Delilah blink.

The lunch break isn't long. Sunny's desperate to keep searching through the evidence of her year.

"I wish I was the kind of person who keeps a diary," she says, scooping up Britney when she jumps onto the coffee table. "Then I might have a chance of piecing together all this stuff. Fuck it, you know what, I'm gonna get a diary. And I'm actually gonna use it." Sunny buries her face in the cat's scruff and inhales deeply. She has such a comforting scent that reminds her of home. Warm cat, soft fur, the vaguest hint of biscuits.

Delilah snaps up, eyes alert. "New Year's Eve," she says.

"Yeah?"

"You vowed to start keeping a diary. You said..."

"What?"

"Well, you said you'd done so many cool things that year, you wanted to remember them. But, yeah, anyway. I remember Viv went out and bought you a diary the same day. I don't know if you actually stuck to it, but ... maybe? I mean, it'll only be four months, but it's something, right?"

Holy shit. Sunny tries to tamp down her excitement at the possibility that there's a book of answers around here somewhere, some clue as to where her head has been since the start of the year. She lets Britney go and starts rummaging through one of the overfilled bags of stuff she dragged here on the bus this morning. Delilah pulls over another and does the same.

"Any chance I showed you what it looks like? Did I ever pin you down and say hey, Lilah, look at this diary that I'm 100% gonna stick to?"

Delilah winces. That's enough of an answer.

Sunny has a lot of shit. She has accumulated so much stuff in the last fourteen months. After a minute of digging, she tips the bag upside down on Viv's floor and vows to clear it up before she gets home – although, she reckons, Viv must know by now that her girlfriend is a chaotic tour de force who creates havoc wherever she goes.

"Aha!" Delilah cries out. Britney jumps, her whole body fluffing up at the sudden noise. Delilah waves a faux leather diary, complete with a lock and everything. Printed across the front cover are the words 12-MONTH DIARY and JAN – DEC 2000. "Any chance you've found a random teeny tiny key?"

"No." Sunny grabs the book and inspects the lock. It doesn't look too strong. She's proved right when she smacks it with a hefty hardcover book (which was already dented and bloated, so she doesn't feel bad) and the lock pops right off, skipping across the wooden floor and coming to land somewhere under the sofa. She opens the diary halfway and flips back from June, through May, past April, to the months that have already happened.

They are, for the most part, completely blank.

"Fuck!"

Delilah laughs. She has to. Because this is so typically Sunny. She makes resolutions and vows but she doesn't have the wherewithal or the focus to follow through. "Is there anything?"

"There are a few entries." Sunny flips to the very start, laying the book flat on the first of January, and her cheeks go hot and pink when she reads her first ever journal entry. It takes up the whole page in her cramped, messy handwriting.

"What does it say?" Delilah adjusts her glasses, trying to read upside down. Sunny holds it up, clears her throat, and reads out loud.

"I said I wanted to start a diary and Viv bet me that I wouldn't be able to keep it up so here I am, writing in my diary. She said she'll take me to Greece if I keep it up all year and this bitch loves a free holiday!"

Delilah's grinning. Hard. "Oh dear. No free holiday for Sunny."

"Fuck's sake." Sunny can't help but laugh, then shakes her head to get back into reading-out-loud mode. "Not really sure what to write here because it's literally the first day of the year and nothing has happened except I've got a banging headache from staying up way too late for New Year's Eve. Viv and I didn't get back until four a.m. and I'm pretty sure my bank account is now less than fucking zero."

"Sounds about right," Delilah interjects. "It was a good night."

Sunny gives her a look – the kind of look that says excuse me, please be quiet while I'm reading to you – and continues. "Anyway, new year, new me and all that shit. I guess I need to start the year and this diary on a good note so let's get this out of the way: I don't know how the fuck I landed such a goddess but let it be known that I fucking love Vivian Dimitra Galanis and I AM GONNA MARRY HER ONE DAY, MARK MY WORDS!"

"Jeez, Sunny, why are you yelling? I'm right here!" Delilah cries out.

Sunny pokes the page. "I wrote it in all caps. I'm going for accuracy with this dramatic reading." She drops her eyes to the page and reads that last line. So there it is in black and white. Red and white, actually. For some reason her first diary entry is written in scratchy, blood-red ink. "I'm gonna marry her one day," she murmurs to herself.

"Yeah, you are," Delilah says. She's smiling so wide, her round cheeks are pushing her glasses up. "I know it's weird for you and to you, you've only known her for, like, a fortnight, but I genuinely can't imagine you without Viv anymore. You two just"—she laces her hands together—"you fit, you know?"

"I know," Sunny says. Because she feels it too. She's felt it for a few days now, that feeling slowly growing. But now, seeing it in her own writing, in her own words, it feels even more real. This was her, only a few months ago.

"Is there anything else?"

She skims through. There are a few more entries about Viv and a few about work, and a few that mention going to see her parents; she talks about finding Britney and nurturing her back to health, and she writes about how she was sure Mack was going to fire her for taking the week off work to save a kitten. There's nothing serious, nothing that deep, until she stumbles on one that stops her in her tracks, from the middle of March.

She reads it a few times, her eyes scanning back and forth.

Viv & I went to her mum's grave today. I know she can't remember her but I can't imagine not having my mums. It made me really fucking sad. I tell my mothers EVERYTHING. What the fuck would I do without them?? I don't fucking know. I think I'd literally die. I mean, I literally tell them everything. I already told them this before I wrote it here. (also fuck I totally failed this fucking diary thing. maybe next year)

Her chest is tight. She takes a deep breath to try to ease it but then there's a prickle behind her eyes and her fingers curl into her palms and she swallows hard, pulling her lips between her teeth and biting down.

Delilah leans forward, peering over Sunny's arm at the words that have silenced her.

When the moment passes and Sunny doesn't feel like she's going to cry anymore, she forces a smile and says, "That's not true anymore." She shoves her hands under her thighs. "There's quite a big fucking secret I'm keeping from them."

Delilah shucks the blanket from her legs and comes to sit next to Sunny on the blue sofa. "Have you thought about telling them?"

Sunny shakes her head. It's one thing to tell her friends, her girlfriend. But her parents? They're proper adults. They'll worry. They'll think something's horribly wrong. Which it kind of is. But she's making it work. The last thing she needs now is setting herself back a few steps by clueing them in.

"I know how crazy it all sounds," she says. "I mean, Mum was a fucking neurosurgeon – she'll think I've got some horrible brain tumour. And yes, before you say anything, I'm aware there is a chance I do have a horrible brain tumour. But I don't want to know about it, and I don't want to worry my parents, and I don't want Mum sending me for an MRI when I tell her that I conjured a black hole and skipped forward fourteen months."

Neither of them say a word for a while. Seconds turn to minutes. Then Delilah lets out a quiet snort of a laugh. Sunny looks at her.

"What?"

"Just, you know. It's Martha. She wouldn't send you for an MRI, Sunny." She squeezes Sunny's thigh and says, "You could tell her every wacky detail of this crazy thing that's happened to you, and you know what she'd say?" Swapping her accent for Martha's, she looks Sunny dead in the eye and says, "Have you had some paracetamol, darling? Perhaps a good rest?"

It's such a fucking spot-on impression. Sunny is stunned and impressed and slightly unnerved. And then the amusement hits, and she laughs. It feels good to laugh. Delilah's right. Martha prescribes paracetamol and rest for everything.

"Thank you," she says, turning her body to face Delilah's, melting against her for a hug. Britney gets jealous of all the attention not being paid to her and nuzzles her way between them. "Don't get too comfortable, Brit. I think I need another coffee. Want one, Lilah?"

"That'd be lovely."

As Sunny's filling the kettle and finding mugs, slowly getting to grips with this new flat and all its hidey-holes, Delilah sits with her arm over the back of the sofa to face her and asks, "Will you ever tell them, d'you reckon?"

Sunny thinks about it. She thinks hard. Her messy brain concocts a hundred different scenarios in a handful of seconds, her thoughts whizzing through them too fast for her to keep up. She is paralysed for a moment, her brain too busy to do anything else, until the storm in her head subsides.

"I don't know. Maybe? Maybe once all of this has blown over and everything feels normal again. If it ever does." She heaps coffee into two mugs and finds the cinnamon, sprinkling it into the cup before she adds the water.

"For what it's worth, your mothers are two of the most patient and understanding people I've ever met, and you're their daughter. They'd do anything to help, I'm sure of it."

That, Sunny can believe. She knows her mothers. She knows the hardships they've fought and beaten. This is a drop in the ocean in comparison. What's this little dilemma of Sunny's compared to the forty-odd years her parents have weathered together?

"I think I'm in a good place with it all, actually," she says. The kettle comes to the boil. She adds a splash of cold water to cool it down before pouring it over the instant granules. "Like, yeah, there are always gonna be things that throw me. Like Bowie. But I'm okay. I don't really need help, per se." She sets the mugs on top of her diary on the coffee table and curls her leg under herself, sighing as she sinks into the squashy cushions. "I just hate the thought of having to keep up this charade for god knows how long it'll be before I've patched together enough of the stuff I missed."

Delilah picks up the heavy book that Sunny used to break the lock on her diary. She thumps it against her hand like it's a baseball bat, like she is some threatening presence. "If it would help, I could give you a quick knock on the head. Then you'll have a feasible excuse for your memory loss."

Sunny grins. She takes the book from Delilah and pushes it as far away as she can. "Thanks, Lilah. If it comes to that, I'll let you know."

Delilah grins and squishes Sunny's cheeks. "I've got your back, Sunny Shelley. Whatever the weather." She eyes the book. "Okay, I couldn't actually knock you out with a book. But I could definitely lie and say I did, if you ever need me too."

"Delilah, Delilah," Sunny says, her chest looser now, her pulse steadier. "Whatever would I do without you?"

*

if only sunny was better at sticking to her promises smh she'd be able to piece things together so much more easily!