I gasped. So Minty had been real and my memory of Grace at the hospital bed must have been real. So much for Heather’s idea of it being a clever way of my subconscious interpreting things.

I glanced over at Eileen. She looked emotional. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ she said and disappeared from the room.

‘This is amazing, isn’t it? God, Bea, it might all be true. Does this room seem familiar?’

‘I don’t think so, but probably because the overriding feeling I have at the moment is pure panic.’ I took a deep breath and looked around. It was then that I noticed a collection of photos on the wall in the corner. I got up to look at them. There was the woman I’d seen in the park in my hypnosis session, Grace, no doubt about it, a slender figure with brown wavy hair. She was with the older woman I’d seen bring her the telegram. Eileen came back in. I pointed to the photographs. ‘This is Grace and her mother?’

‘It is,’ she said. She pointed to another photo showing an elderly woman. ‘And that was my mother, Lily.’

‘Grace’s older sister.’

‘You seem to know an awful lot about my family,’ said Eileen.

‘I do and I don’t. Only what I’ve found on the Internet.’

I was fascinated by the photo of Grace on the wall. It had obviously been taken in a photographer’s studio. She had bright eyes and a friendly looking, open face. Could that have been me in there, in that body? I wondered. I felt faint and put my hand out to steady myself on a chair.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Eileen.

I sat down. ‘Not really.’ My mind was reeling. This was far beyond a bit of fun with a fortune-teller, a session with a hypnotist, speculation about a lost soulmate. Eileen had confirmed that Minty had existed and her real name was Amelia. Saranya Ji hadn’t mentioned that Grace had had a daughter. No one had, not until now: that had come from inside me. The only way I could possibly have known about her was if, as Saranya Ji had told me, I had been Grace Harris. The implication hit me like a brick. Grace, Billy, past lives, soulmates; it could all be true, after all.

‘My mother died thirteen years ago and Grace, well, she died when she was twenty-three, not long after Minty. My mother said she reckoned that she died of a broken heart so soon after—’

‘Losing Billy too,’ said Heather.

God, that woman never knows when to shut up, I thought.

Eileen nodded. ‘So you know about him as well?’

‘Oh yes, he was killed in action, wasn’t he?’ said Heather.

‘He was, in France. A tragic story. He never knew about his daughter.’