‘Who took her, Nonna?’ Tom tried as well, but she carried on talking about Connie and Gio, leaving Grace to wonder if this meant that Lara never did come to Italy with Connie. Or did Nonna Maria mean that Lara had died too? But it still didn’t explain why Connie went to America with the necklace for a child and then presumably brought it back, only for it to be found in the jewellery box decades later? And from what Nonna Maria had managed to tell them about Giovanni’s family, it seemed highly unlikely that Connie would have been visiting them, let alone taking a Star of David necklace for another young girl’s bat mitzvah, when his family were Catholics and so opposed to Connie. So it must have been for Lara: who else could have it been for?

‘I don’t know,’ Nonna Maria said, bringing Grace back to the moment. ‘Connie didn’t have a baby when she came to Italia.’ Ah, so Grace’s suspicion was correct … Connie wasn’t allowed to bring her child. But how could her parents have prevented it? Connie would have been an adult by then. A married woman, too. Unless … and an awful, devastating chill ran right through Grace as she considered another possibility … did Lara die in the war? Is that why she didn’t come to Italy? Did Connie take her back to London before the war ended, when she was still a young child? Is that what Nonna Maria meant?

But this couldn’t be right, as Connie had been full of joy on VE Day at the end of the war, dancing and planning her future with Giovanni … and Lara. They were to be a family, together. So what had changed all that? Grace just couldn’t work it all out and vowed to speed-read through the rest of the papers from Connie’s unit that she had stored on her laptop. She had read most of the diary pages and ad hoc notes, but they had tailed off in the early Fifties, with just the odd words here and there on each page from then on – Glorious day. Sad. The warm sun lifts my spirit. Marvellous trip out. Party on the yacht, that kind of thing. Very bland compared to Connie’s emotionally descriptive earlier entries, and no mention of Lara, which in itself was very ominous … but people didn’t just disappear, Lara had to be somewhere, and Grace wasn’t about to give up now. Giovanni’s family behaving the way they had towards Connie just made Grace more determined to put right the wrongs that had been meted out to her.

Chapter 21