‘I’m not saying he knew how valuable it was. He may just have taken it as a sort of souvenir. But our mother set a lot of store by her ancestry. He was a teenager and, let’s be honest, he was pretty hopeless. Even if she’d wanted to give him something, there would’ve been no guarantee that he wouldn’t have lost it. She just wouldn’t have entrusted anything to him. He must have taken it.’

At this Dawn stood up abruptly, high spots of colour in her cheeks.

‘You need to watch your tongue, young lady. Hazel here is showing you the courtesy of including you in her plan for the medal and you’re offering nothing but baseless accusations. We don’t speak ill of the dead, where I come from; but you don’t seem to have heard about that. She’s come a long way for this and you need to hear her out.’ She turned to Adam. ‘I reckon we could do with another cup of coffee, if you don’t mind? Give everyone a moment.’

Everyone looked shocked by the force of her outburst, Dawn included. Adam stood.

‘I’ll come and give you a hand,’ said Cass.

Dawn excused herself and left the room to get a breath of air. Hazel and Georgie stayed where they were. Georgie looked at the woman sitting across from her. It was inevitable that she should have been thinking about Stephen over the past couple of days, as she tried to summon memories to share with his sister. It was all such a long time ago. She’d struggled to create anything like a viable account out of what impressions she retained. And what she hadn’t told Hazel, could never tell her, was what she remembered best: Stephen in the narrow wooden bed at the top of the house, his long pale limbs, the tender sweetness of him in the dark. How beautiful he had been and how unaware of that beauty. He hadn’t been her first lover, but sleeping with him had been her first experience of making what had felt like actual love. Abandon. Whispering into his ear. The different tastes of him. The smoothness of his arms and chest. Once, when they’d finished, they’d both lain back and giggled from the sheer exhilaration and joy they’d given each other. All her life she had carried the warm, secret memory of those nights inside herself. And here was his sister, someone she would once have considered to be an old woman: someone with grey hair and wrinkles and a thick waist. Someone dowdy, even frumpish, with sensible, ugly shoes. Someone who was in fact several years younger than herself.