OK, that was weird, I thought as I closed my laptop. What they’d said had shocked me and I wished I could remember more but I couldn’t. Billy, a soldier off to war, and I’d been planning to marry him? A girl making a wedding dress from scraps of material. A dressmaker? That was spooky. My mind went into overdrive. It was almost word for word what Saranya Ji had told me. Where had this invention of my imaginary friend come from? A past life? No. I’d known someone called Billy and remembered him when I was young? No. Could what Saranya Ji said have some truth in it? No. It’s coincidence, I told myself again, get a grip. I was reading too much into it all. And, if it wasn’t coincidence, then Saranya Ji was one of these people who could tune into a person’s memories, a mind-reader. Yes, that could explain it, of course; she’d merely picked up on some lost memory of mine from my childhood and played it back to me, embellishing it with nonsense about a soulmate from a past life. Billy. Clever of her, quite a skill; only he wasn’t from a past life, he was from my early life, no more than an imaginary friend, someone created to play with when my older brother was busy with his friends. I’d probably seen a TV programme about a handsome soldier and his fiancée and it had captured my imagination. Or heard one of my aunts talking about some distant relative who had gone to war and another who worked as a dressmaker. That would be it. Children were forever making up stories and pretending to be other people. Billy and Grace were nothing more than the results of a child’s vivid imagination.

I felt happy that I’d found a rational explanation, and I’d almost convinced myself, but not quite: what Mum and Matthew had told me had niggled. Why do so many children have imaginary friends? I asked myself. I got out my laptop and googled ‘imaginary friends in childhood’.

There were pages of sites, and I felt reassured as I read that inventing an imaginary friend was ‘a healthy part of childhood that helps develop vocal skills’. ‘Gives children a chance to tell someone else what to do’, was another comment. That made sense. With an elder brother always telling me what to do, I’d probably imagined this Billy as someone I could boss around. ‘Invented when lonely or bored’; ‘Evidence of a child tapping into its imagination’, other sites suggested. I felt a sense of relief as I read the explanations but then – oh no – as I continued scrolling, there were sites linking imaginary friends to past life memories.

‘Children recall people or events from past lives, often up to the age of five, after which they are usually overlooked.’