Its so noisey here at night. Do you remember how quiet it would be in the feelds, under the stars? When we were in the woods. Like we were the only people in the world even though we werent. The other people who came and lived under the stars, they didnt feel it like we did Colleen.”

Heather scanned to the bottom of the page and squinted at the name there. A Michael? Next to the scratchy signature was a green tick stamp, and then printed next to it in a different pen and handwriting were the words REAVE and APPROVED. Reave, thought Heather. Michael Reave.

Her stomach turned over slowly. The name felt oddly familiar, although she couldn’t say why. She stood up, putting the letters back in the biscuit tin, and took them with her down the ladder. Back in the kitchen, she spent some time making a quick sandwich and a pot of very hot coffee.

She removed the elastic bands from both piles, and for the next hour read through twenty or so of the letters. By the end of it, her throat felt hot and her head was thumping steadily, the sandwich abandoned on its plate. With a slightly shaking hand she put the letters back in the tin, and thought about all the things she knew about her mother, and all the things she didn’t.

Quiet, well-to-do, respectable Colleen Evans had been writing to a man in prison for the last twenty-five years. She had, in fact, been writing to this mysterious man even before that—while Heather’s father had been alive, all through the early years of their marriage. It also appeared that in the ’70s, her mother had been a part of some sort of hippy commune, somewhere up north.

Heather rubbed her hand across her eyes, trying to make sense of this new information. Her mum had never been the type for reminiscing, and Heather had never questioned it. Now it was apparent there was a whole stretch of her life that had never even been hinted at. As far as she’d ever known, there had been no other serious relationships with anyone other than her dad. Yet here was this man in the letters. This man who, it seemed, was in prison.

And in all the letters Heather had read, her mother hadn’t mentioned that she had a daughter. Not once.

Who was this man? Reluctantly she thought of the suicide note again, the strange phrases her mum had used—as though she was talking to someone as well as Heather.

“Oh, shut up,” Heather murmured to herself. “You’re jumping to conclusions now.”

She gulped down the last of the coffee and pulled her laptop from her bag. Her mother had always been something of a technophobe and had refused to get even dial-up Internet, so Heather had to piggyback off the Internet data on her phone, and within seconds she had the Internet browser page up. She looked at the name, Michael Reave, sitting in the search box.