The Last Days of Summer

Item 7: Ghosts

There are lots of different sorts of ghosts – poltergeists, crisis apparitions, vengeful ghosts – even ghosts who don’t know they’re dead yet.

I think the Rose Garden ghost must be a ghost with unfinished business.

I wonder if Granddad will be one too.

Excerpt from Caroline Ryan’s List of the Unexplained (with notes)

I woke to Edward’s hand on my shoulder, and a fresh glass of water on the bedside table.

“Pat Norris just pulled up,” he murmured, his voice bedroom soft. It made me want to reach my arms around his neck and kiss him again, but I managed to restrain myself. “I’m just going to round up the others.”

I washed and changed clothes quickly, pulling on jeans and a T-shirt from my case. My make-up had worn away hours before, and my eyes were too sore from all the crying to think about redoing it. I ran a brush through my hair and called it job done.

Downstairs, I found the family all nervously perched around the drawing room, sipping tea and not eating biscuits.

“How about some anniversary cake, Pat,” Dad tried, but Nathaniel’s lawyer shook his head. He was, very clearly, here for one purpose only, and keen to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the day with my family in their current temper, either.

“Shall we begin?” he asked, and we all nervously nodded, except for Isabelle, who continued to stare out of the window as if none of it mattered at all, really. I knew my grandmother, though. She was listening most carefully.

Mr Norris started in with the usual explanations and disclaimers – when Nathaniel had last updated his will (more recently than I’d have expected – just two weeks ago) and what instructions he had left, which at least vindicated Edward’s insistence that the study door remain locked until Mr Norris’s arrival. Isabelle scowled briefly at that, before regaining her expression of bereaved indifference.

“Now, the actual bequests.” This part, at least, seemed straightforward – almost everything went to Isabelle, including the rights to all his books. There was also a generous allowance made to Therese until her death, along with the deeds to her cottage. Isabelle scowled at this too, but Therese’s face and shoulders relaxed for the first time that day. I let out a small sigh of relief. One less thing to worry about.

There were bequests to Mum and Dad, and smaller ones to us grandchildren. Caro’s would be held in trust until her eighteenth birthday. As a favoured granddaughter, Caro was also left Nathaniel’s collection of his own first editions, all signed. But there was nothing in there to really upset Isabelle.

“To Saskia Ryan and Edward Hollis, I leave the notes, files and existing work achieved on my planned memoirs, on the understanding that they complete and publish the work according to the plans I leave. Should they not be willing to undertake this task, the files will be boxed, sealed and delivered to my lawyers, to be auctioned off in twenty years’ time, with the money going to my nominated charity. If they do complete the work, they are to share equally any profits made.”

“That impossible man!” Isabelle shrieked, slamming her teacup down so hard a crack spread out from the base. “He cannot possibly have done this!”

“Saskia, you’re not really thinking of taking over writing the memoirs, are you?” Therese asked, calmer, but with a similar edge of panic in her voice. I started with surprise. I’d thought that Therese, at least, didn’t care about the memoirs – but it seemed she was as apprehensive as everyone else. Why?

“I…I didn’t know he’d done this,” I said, staring at Edward, but no one was listening to me.

What had Nathaniel been thinking? He must have known how this decision would go down with the family. Why would he put this on me? And why on earth hadn’t he told me?

Edward’s gaze darted away from mine and I wondered, had he known? Had Nathaniel warned him?

“But, how can you write them, Kia?” Mum asked, frowning. “I mean, not that you can’t write, sweetheart. But you weren’t there, were you? You don’t know. It would be irresponsible to try and tell a true story you don’t really know.”

Irresponsible. The word cut out at me. Didn’t they all already believe that was what I was? And weren’t they right?

Whatever Nathaniel had intended by naming me in his will this way, he certainly hadn’t made my coming home any easier.

“Nathaniel has left very comprehensive notes,” Edward said, his voice calm. Unlike the rest of the room. “Along with his diaries and journals, which chronicle his life from an early age. With Saskia’s family and personal knowledge, and my experience in writing biographies…it shouldn’t be too hard to put together an accurate picture of his life.”

He might have been talking to the room at large, but he was watching me as he spoke. Edward wanted me to do this, I realised. He wanted me to risk alienating my surviving family, to honour the last wishes of my grandfather. And, of course, make Edward’s career. I couldn’t ignore the fact that he had a professional reason to want me on board with this.

While my family, apparently, had myriad personal reasons for wanting me to refuse. I just wished I knew what they were.

“You! You really think you can write my husband’s life story after knowing him for, what, eighteen months? Fifty years of marriage, not to mention the twenty-six before that, and you think you can condense everything important into a couple of hundred pages? A few pithy anecdotes and some heart-wrenching sob stories? You’re a hack, Edward, and you’re crazy if you think we’re going to let you tarnish Nathaniel’s memory with your words.”

Edward’s face turned ghost white, the same colour as his knuckles as he grasped the back of the chair in front of him. The rest of the family fell silent – whether in shock or agreement, I couldn’t be certain.

But I sure as hell wasn’t letting Isabelle get away with that, grief or not. Just because she was beating herself up about her last moments with Nathaniel, that didn’t give her permission to treat Edward that way.

“Stop.” The word came out louder than I’d intended, and suddenly all eyes were on me. I swallowed, and tried to sound like I wasn’t making it all up as I went along. “Nathaniel left this project to both of us. He obviously believed that we could produce the book he wanted. There’s no need to attack Edward just because Nathaniel trusted him with this. It’s his decision whether he thinks he can do it. Not ours.”

“Well, actually it is a bit yours, Saskia.” Pat Norris lifted the paper in his hand with a small smile. “The terms of the will are very clear. You and Edward both have to agree to proceed.”

“Well, it’s decided then,” Isabelle said, crossing her arms firmly over her chest. “They won’t be doing it. Saskia would never betray her family like that. Would you, Kia?”

The pointed look she gave me, followed by the glance at Ellie, stabbed straight to my heart. I knew what she was saying, even if the words she used were different. You’ve already betrayed your sister. Surely you wouldn’t hurt the rest of us this way, too. You wouldn’t let us down again. Imagine how your parents would feel. Imagine telling the world what you did, in print. Imagine your friends and family finding out what you are in the pages of a book. You’d never be welcome at Rosewood again.

I stared at Edward, willing him to find the right answer for me. Nathaniel had wanted me to do this. But it could cost me everything.

“Saskia, we just don’t want you to jump into something and make a mistake,” Mum said. “You have to think of the family, darling.”

“Isabelle does have a point,” Therese added. “I know you loved Nathaniel very much, but you weren’t there for most of his life. And you’ve never written anything like this before. You said yourself that you mostly just type up press releases.” I winced at her description of my job, accurate as it was.

“And really, Kia, do you honestly think it’s a good idea to air all our dirty laundry to the public?” Ellie’s voice was sharp, and filled with as much hidden meaning as Isabelle’s had been.

Reality sank in. Not only did no one want me to take on the project of Nathaniel’s memoirs, no one even believed I could do it.

“Stop. All of you.” Dad came up and put an arm around my shoulders. I stared up at him in surprise. I don’t think I’d ever heard him sound so stern, so commanding, in my whole life. My dad wasn’t the one who argued, who shouted, who got involved. He was the one who brought biscuits.

“Nathaniel left this choice to Saskia and Edward, correct?” Dad looked over at Pat Norris, who nodded. “So it’s up to them to make it. Not you, not me. Them.”

“Tony, really. You don’t understand,” Mum started, impatiently, but Dad stopped her.

“I understand perfectly, Sally. You’re all angry with the wrong person. You’re all furious with Nathaniel for deciding to write his memoirs, and for leaving the job to Saskia and Edward – not to mention dying in the first place. But shouting at them isn’t going to change anything. Nathaniel wanted his memoirs published. He wanted those stories out there. And however scared you all are about facing the consequences of your history, of seeing your secrets down in black and white, it’s out of your hands now. It’s not up to us. It’s up to them. They’re adults, capable of reason and sensibility. So I suggest we sit back, let them talk about it, and wait for them to tell us their decision. Okay?” There was no room for argument in Dad’s tone, and when no one spoke, he nodded, and placed a kiss on the top of my head before letting me go. “Good. Now, who wants a biscuit?”

“I suppose any decisions should wait until after the funeral, anyway,” Mum said, and the others nodded their agreement.

“Great,” I said, my palms still sweating, despite my father’s faith in my adulting abilities. “Then we can just… wait. That sounds good.”

I might not be able to put the decision off for ever, but right now I’d take what I could get.

“Then, if we’re finished discussing this point, there are a few more bequests to discuss,” Pat said, as calmly as if it had been a small debate about a porcelain figurine, or something. “Mostly smaller items, left to family and friends who particularly admired them, plus a few charitable bequests.”

While the rest of the room settled down to eat biscuits and listen, I caught Edward’s eye and tipped my head towards the door. He gave a small nod, and followed as I slipped out into the hallway. As the door shut behind us, I head Isabelle exclaim, “Why would he leave anything to her!?”

“How long do you think this will go on?” Edward asked, as we took up familiar positions on the staircase and listened to the noise through the closed door. As much as I didn’t want to be in the room, I also didn’t want to be so far away I couldn’t step in and separate people if it started to sound like Mr Norris’s life was in danger.

“No real way of telling,” I said, looping my arms over my knees. “We’ve never actually been through something like this before.”

We listened in silence for a few more moments to the muffled discussion beyond the door. I doubted Isabelle really objected to anything else in the will. Any anger from her now was just misplaced from the memoirs. I wasn’t fool enough to believe that Dad had defused that bomb for good. Still, out here, with Edward, everything felt calmer, as if the pressure weighing down on me from my family had been lifted, just for a time. Just while Edward was there to carry some of it.

“You knew, didn’t you? Nathaniel told you what he’d done?” I tilted my head to look up at him as I waited for a response.

Edward sighed. “Not exactly. I knew he wanted you to work on the project with us. I thought he was planning to ask you while you were home.”

“He didn’t.” At least, not in so many words. But when I looked back at our conversations…I could see every one of them leading to this moment.

Then, “What are you thinking?” Edward asked, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his breath tickling my ear.

He laughed almost silently, a huff of warm air against my throat. “I meant about the will. About the memoirs.”

Ah. A slightly trickier proposition than whether or not to just get drunk and ignore everything else.

“I’m not sure,” I answered, which was at least honest. “On the one hand, it was practically his dying wish. But on the other…”

Not just hate me. I’d be an outcast again, even more than I already was. Deciding to take on the memoirs with Edward might mean giving up any hope of ever being welcome at Rosewood again.

“That’s definitely part of it. Plus the fact that I still can’t be sure if Nathaniel didn’t only want to have his memoirs published to piss everyone else off.”

Edward laughed again, louder this time, a short, sharp bark of a laugh that felt like he cut it off just in time to make sure that none of the family heard and came out to physically attack him. “Yeah, I could see that,” he said, quieter. “But I don’t think that’s why. I worked with him for over a year on this. He wanted this story to be told for it’s own sake, I think. Like all the stories he told before. He wanted other people to be able to know it.”

I twisted around to face him, leaning my back against the hard wood rails of the banister, feeling them press against my spine. “You say he told you he wanted me to work on the memoirs with you. What about the will? Had he told you he was going to do this?” My voice was still calm and quiet, I realised, despite the bubbles of confusion and frustration and anger that were bouncing around inside of me.

“No.” I must have looked disbelieving, despite the strength in his voice, because Edward went on. “Honestly, Saskia, I didn’t know he’d done this. I thought… I thought that maybe he’d have made some arrangement with his publisher, that maybe they’d want to hire me on to finish the job, but I really didn’t expect…”

“Okay. I believe you.” I sat straight again, fixing my eyes on the drawing room door.

“Is it… Are you worried that it will be awkward, working with me?” Since it appeared from his voice that it was awkward for him to even ask the question, I wondered how much of his concern also applied to him. “I mean, after… Well, you know. The other night.”

“Edward,” I said, stopping him before it got more excruciating for either one of us. “I assure you that I am much more concerned about my family’s collective mental health than I am about working with a man I almost slept with.”

“That said,” I carried on, turning back to face him again. “I am glad you’re still here. I wouldn’t want to have to do this without you.” For some reason, my voice came out a lot softer than I’d intended, and my hand found its way to Edward’s knee, ostensibly just for a quick, reassuring pat. But somehow his hand was covering mine, and the warmth and reassurance seemed to be flowing the other way.

What would I have done if Edward hadn’t been here? If Nathaniel had left this responsibility only to me, and I’d had to make these decisions in the face of family uproar? If they’d all had one more reason to hate me?

As he held on to my hand, I let myself accept for the first time how really very glad I was that Edward was there to share the misery with me.

I looked up as the drawing room door opened, but Edward didn’t let go of my hand until Ellie was already out of the room in the hallway staring at us.

“Right,” she said, sounding pretty much done in. “Sorry.” And with that, she turned and walked out of the front door into the summer afternoon.

“Damn it,” Edward said, mostly under his breath, and got to his feet. “I’d better go see if she’s… See where she’s gone, anyway.”

My jaw felt suddenly tight, and I realised I was gritting my teeth at the reminder that Edward was Ellie’s friend, first. He wasn’t here for me – he was here for Nathaniel, for Ellie, for the family, for the work. I was just incidental.

In a few long strides he was down the stairs and on his way out the door. I stayed where I was, arms wrapped around my knees again, listening to my family tearing itself apart in the other room.

“Are they nearly finished in there?” Caro appeared in the doorway from the kitchen dressed in a pair of yellow shorts with flamingos on, pink glittery shoes, and a T-shirt that announced to the world that, tomorrow, she planned to be a mermaid. In her hand was a bare cupcake. “Only, Dad said he’d help me decorate these later.”

I looked at the plain cupcake, then at my little sister. Maybe I couldn’t fix my relationship with Ellie, and maybe I was about to destroy my relationships with the rest of my family too, if I chose to take on the memoirs.

But I was still Caro’s big sister. And that was a relationship I could strengthen, right now.

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said, getting to my feet. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

“Wow!” Caro’s eyes widened as we reached the ladder at the bottom of the tree house. “How did I not know this was here?”

I grinned. “It’s a secret. Nobody knew about it except me and Nathaniel. And now you.”

“Of course! That’s why we came here. Go on. You first.” I watched her disappear up the ladder, her glittery shoes gripping tight to the wood, before I followed.

It felt strange, watching Caro flit around the inside of the tree house, discovering all the treasures I’d left there over the years – and one of Nathaniel’s old pipes, too. She handed that to me, and I held it in both hands, as if it might carry answers from my grandfather from beyond the grave.

“Who made the house?” Caro perched on a small stool pulling her feet up onto it and hugging her knees. “Was it the fairies?”

I tried to imagine Graham the Assistant as a fairy, and failed. “Probably,” I said. “I used to play here when I was younger. I figured that you might like to, now.”

“I’ll be going back to Perth soon.” Although, honestly, camping out in the tree house seemed like a viable alternative at the moment.

“So do I.” If I said no to the memoirs, would I be able to stay at Rosewood? Maybe. But then, maybe not. Making the decision my family wanted this time didn’t undo the harm I’d done before. And could I really stay, knowing I’d let my grandfather down at the last? I wasn’t sure.

I had a life in Perth. It might not be the one Nathaniel had planned for me, but it was mine. And I couldn’t just give that up. Could I?

“So, what do you want to play?” Caro asked. “Elves and fairies? Ghost hunters?”

I smiled across the small wooden room at her. Whatever happened next, right now I had Caro beside me, and games to play. “Why don’t you tell me about how your paranormal research is going.”

Caro’s face lit up again, as she jumped up and pulled a pink notebook from her pocket. “Do you want to go alphabetically or in the order I discovered them?”

“Whichever you like,” I told her, and settled back against the wooden wall to listen.

By the time Caro and I made it back up to the house, Dad was waiting with a bowl of buttercream icing, and the news that Mr Norris had declared he had a long drive back to the coast, and sitting there listening to everyone arguing wasn’t getting him there any sooner. Therese, meanwhile, was waiting for me. It was around this time that Isabelle realised that Edward still had the key to the study, and I could hear her demanding to know where he was from behind me as Therese dragged me out of the front door and down the path that led to her cottage. As Ellie and Edward still hadn’t returned, there wasn’t much I could say to help, anyway.

My great-aunt clearly wasn’t in the mood for conversation, so I allowed myself to be taken down to the cottage, where Therese set about making tea with the maximum possible amount of clashing of crockery and clanging silverware.

“Can I help with anything?” I asked, finally, as Therese spilt milk all over the tea tray.

“No,” she bit out, mopping it up with a tea towel. “Go have a seat in the sitting room. We’re going to have tea.”

“Did you all get anything sorted out?” I asked, when we were finally seated and Therese had slopped tea into both my cup and saucer.

“Yes,” Therese said, snatching up a chocolate biscuit. “I decided that your entire family are self-absorbed fools, who are interested in nothing beyond their own petty secrets.”

“And they are most certainly not interested in mourning my brother or making his dying wish a reality,” she went on, spraying biscuit crumbs. I’d never seen Therese eat with her mouth full before. It was certainly an experience.

“I thought you didn’t want the memoirs to be published, either?” It was dodgy territory, I know, but I figured that if I were going to make a decision about what to do next, I would need all the information I could get. Once that information could be conveyed at a reasonable decibel, and one piece at a time.

“I want the story it tells to be true and accurate,” Therese clarified. “And it’s not that I don’t trust you, dear, but you weren’t there. I’m not sure how you can recreate the childhood Nathaniel and I shared.”

“Edward says the early years are pretty much finished, actually,” I reassured her. “If we decide to go ahead, perhaps you’d like to read them through, see what you think.”

Even that was dangerous ground, I realised. After all, what two siblings have exactly the same memories of how they grew up? Everyone remembers things differently. On the other hand, if Therese was upset by what Nathaniel had written, would I want it published anyway?

Therese paused in her destruction of the chocolate biscuits. “Maybe I would like that,” she said, and returned her half-eaten biscuit to the plate. “We shouldn’t be eating these, you know. Your father will be cooking a three-course dinner. Stress cooking, as usual.”

I didn’t point out that none of us had eaten any lunch, given the lawyer baiting that had been going on at the time. I wished Therese had waited long enough for us to snag a couple of Caro’s cupcakes to go with the tea.

“Anyway,” Therese went on, pushing herself to her feet. “I have clothes for you.” Dad stressed cooked, Therese stress dressed, it seemed. Not that I was complaining, as the beneficiary of both.

I traipsed after her into her bedroom and discovered, inevitably, that these were no ordinary hand-me-down clothes.

“This outfit is for tonight,” she said, handing me a hanger weighed down with a grey and duck egg blue tea dress with vines and tiny cream flowers climbing up it. It was cut in a forties’ style, and Therese had hung a duck egg cardigan over it on the hanger. The matching cream handbag and string of pearls were wrapped around the hanger. “The earrings are in the bag,” she added, passing over the cream heels that went with it.

“Do you really think we’ll be dressing for dinner tonight?” I took the dress and considered it. It was sober enough to fit the mood at the house, but still far nicer than anything I’d brought with me.

“Nathaniel would have shown up in his old orange jumper with the oil stains on and you know it.” I still couldn’t quite imagine that he wouldn’t. That he’d never wear that jumper again. Isabelle would probably dress him in some awful suit he’d have hated for the funeral.

Maybe she’d be distracted enough to let Therese choose his clothes for that. I could just see him dressed as a thirties’ film star for the occasion.

“Nathaniel was a law to himself,” Therese said. “No reason to let our standards slip.” She paused, her fingers brushing against a closed garment bag. “I’ll have an outfit for you for the funeral, too,” she said slowly. “But not just yet. I’ll bring it up to the house when it’s ready. I just want to make sure that it’s right.”

I hadn’t even thought about the funeral. I certainly hadn’t packed anything mourning appropriate when I came home for the Golden Wedding.

“You’re coming up for dinner?” I folded the evening’s outfit over my arm carefully.

“Of course,” Therese said, closing her wardrobe door. “Especially now we’ve established that Isabelle is definitely too angry with you and Edward to notice that I’m there at all.”

“Excellent,” I said, trying to imagine just how horrible dinner was going to be.

And with that, I was hustled back out onto the sunny path, clutching my new outfit close to my body, like some sort of shield. At least Therese’s outfits gave me an armour of sorts. Some protection against the fraught dinner ahead. As long as no one resorted to throwing food… Well, it should be fine.

Dad, obviously anticipating the general chaos that Mr Norris’s visit would bring to the day, had started preparing dinner much earlier that morning, and chosen something that was easy, liked by everyone, yet could sit in the oven for hours while the family bickered over inheritance matters.

By the time I made it down to dinner, dressed in Therese’s chosen outfit, the family were already sitting down at the dining table. Whether they’d skipped the pre-dinner drinks altogether, or if they’d all been steadily drinking since Mr Norris left, I had no way of knowing.

Regardless, it made it slightly easier to slip into the room unnoticed. Dad, out of loving kindness for his middle daughter, had kept the seat beside him, the one closest to the door, free for me, for which I gave a quiet vote of thanks.

From the other side of the table, Edward gave me a small, tight smile. I wondered how long he’d already been there.

“Right then,” Dad said, bearing in a huge pot. “Pasta bolognese. With about a bottle and a half of red wine in it. Just the thing for tonight, don’t you think?”

We all made the appropriate appreciative noises, and avoided looking at each other.

Dinner was, perhaps not surprisingly, a fairly silent meal. Isabelle, I noticed, ate as little as possible, pushing her pasta around her bowl and looking faintly sulky. Her loss, I thought, as I tucked into the bolognese with gusto. Dad might not have been able to heal all family rifts, but he certainly knew how to cook dinner.

The seat at the head of the table was, of course, empty, and as much as I avoided looking at it, I still felt the lack of Nathaniel keenly. It wasn’t as though he’d have been able to make everything all better. On the contrary, he’d probably have gone out of his way to make things worse, purely for entertainment value, and at some later date snippets of the ensuing fight would have shown up, entirely out of context, in one of his books.

Something Nathaniel did fairly regularly, but never admitted to critics, was put his family into the background of his novels. We never appeared as main characters, or even any incidental character anyone would remember. But when the hero was sitting in a cafe listening to a couple arguing, or the heroine was walking in the park and saw a small girl fall in the lake shallows as she tried to feed the ducks, her grandfather standing there laughing while her grandmother yelled – that was us. Every time.

As Greg swiped the last piece of garlic bread, Mum pushed her empty plate aside and put on her serious teacher face. It never looked right on her. Mum was the opposite of serious and focused, but sometimes she liked to pretend, just for our benefit.

“We should talk about the funeral,” she said. “Shouldn’t we?” she added, belying the decisiveness of her words.

“We should,” Ellie confirmed. “Apparently Nathaniel didn’t leave much in the way of instructions. Isabelle, did he ever say anything to you about what he wanted?”

“Why would he?” Isabelle sounded astonished, and I exchanged a frustrated glance with Edward.

Because you’re both in your seventies. Because you were his whole world, once. Because that’s the sort of thing people do. Normal people.

People who believed they were going to die, anyway. I suspected that Isabelle just intended to go on for ever, and Nathaniel wouldn’t ever have wanted to consider the possibility. Except that he had, with Edward. He’d made provisions to ensure that his memoirs were taken care of, and his legacy. Just not his body.

“Did he have any favourite hymns?” Dad asked. “That’s always a good place to start.”

I glanced up at Edward again. Nathaniel had hated going to church, and everyone knew it. And yet, because her social circle would expect it, Isabelle would plan a traditional church funeral.

“He liked For Those in Peril on the Sea,” Therese added, which earned her a glare from Isabelle.

“I’ll contact the vicar tomorrow,” Ellie said, and Isabelle shook her head.

“No. He was my husband. Leave it to me.” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a headache. I think I’ll go to bed.”

“I think it’s your bedtime too, young lady,” Dad said to Caro, scooping her up from her chair. “Come on. I’ll read you a story. I don’t care if you’re nearly ten, you’re never too old for a bedtime story.” Caro protested, but only for a moment. She looked as exhausted as the rest of us.

The door clicked shut behind the three of them, and I looked from face to face around the table. What happened now? I had no idea. I didn’t know where to start. How did this work? How did we function without Nathaniel?

I worried for a moment that they’d want to talk about the memoirs again, but it quickly became clear that they all had bigger concerns.

Therese shook her head. “I wouldn’t recommend it. She’ll probably insist on funeral favours.”

“She wouldn’t,” Mum said, sounding tired. “But if you could help her out, Ellie… She works so much better with you.”

“Of course.” Ellie didn’t point out that Isabelle only liked working with her because she could boss her around, which I would have. “But what are we going to do after the funeral? Greg and I…” She trailed off, but I thought I caught her meaning. Living at Rosewood with Nathaniel and Isabelle and Therese had been one thing. Taking sole responsibility for Isabelle was another entirely.

“Let me talk to your father,” Mum said. “We don’t need to be back in Manchester for the start of term for a few more days. Maybe I can look at taking a leave of absence.”

I should offer to move back. To take care of things. To be useful, for once. But I wasn’t at all sure that they wanted me to.

I glanced up at him again and found that, somehow, he’d disappeared from the room without any of us noticing. When? Had he followed Dad and Caro out? And where had he gone?

While Mum, Ellie, Greg and Therese talked about the future, I slipped out of my chair, opening and closing the dining room door as silently as possible, and headed for the stairs – and the past.