They walked along the winding path in silence. The grass needed cutting, but there was sorrel and vetch blooming, and the air smelled sweet. Rituals were comforting when you had lost someone, she had learned. Today, for instance, like every year, the anniversary would be stitched together with one tradition after another, journeys they repeated because it made them feel closer to their son, places to revisit and mark the passing of time. They always began with this annual visit to the headstone, and the laying of flowers. Lorna liked to tidy up the plot, if necessary, and then they’d say a few words each, usually about how much they missed him. After that, they would—

‘Who’s that?’ Roy asked suddenly, as they rounded a corner and came to a halt. Because there, beside Aidan’s grave, was the unexpected sight of a kneeling woman.

Lorna stared, dumbfounded. The woman was leaning against the stone with one arm around it, as if confiding secrets to a lover.

Lorna tightened her own arm on Roy’s. It felt as if someone was trespassing on her heart. ‘What on earth . . . ?’ she said, breaking free from his grasp and marching hurriedly on. Emotion whirled up through her like a tornado: anger and hurt and pain. Of all the days, of all the moments, she did not want to encounter some weirdo here, on the twentieth anniversary of Aidan’s death. Who was this woman touching his gravestone as if she had some kind of right to it? Was she on drugs? Was she mentally unwell? Go away, she thought. Get your hands off my son and get out of here!

‘Hello?’ she called out, her voice strident and accusing, but with just a hint of a crack in it. A crack that Lorna knew could either turn into a sob or a roar. ‘Can I help you?’

Then the woman turned, her eyes bloodshot, her cheeks puffy where she’d been crying, and Lorna stopped dead again, staring as her brain tried to assimilate this face with the one she’d known many years before. ‘Olivia?’ she whispered, unable to tear her gaze away. ‘Olivia, is that you?’

The woman rose. She had put on weight in the last twenty years – haven’t we all? thought Lorna – and her blonde hair, which had once been a pixie cut with a swooping fringe when she was eighteen, was tugged messily back into a ponytail. But Lorna recognized those storm-grey eyes and the woman’s beautiful alabaster skin, even if there was now a fretwork of lines etched on her forehead.

‘Lorna,’ she replied, her voice almost a whisper, as if she had seen a ghost. ‘Roy.’ Her mouth trembled as they approached and she took a step back. ‘I . . . I hope you don’t mind me being here.’