“Of course, Cara, you just take all the time you need.”

I open the door and Brian’s face is all worry as he puts a sweaty palm on my arm, his eyebrows knitted together, and he tilts his head as he says, “Cara, have you heard of post-traumatic stress disorder?”

I have a disorder now?

I shake my head as I push past Brian and say, “I’ll call when I’m ready to come back.” Ignoring all the curious eyes that blink out at me from the darkness of the pub, I grab my bag and coat from behind the bar and let the door bang behind me.

The seagull is still back standing on the table I’d been scrubbing just minutes before, and there’s a white rectangle under the salt shaker. I pick up the business card and read Jon’s name, his contact details. Not wanting Brian and the others to know I was talking to a reporter, especially not Jon Katrin, I shove his card into my pocket and fall, with relief, behind the wheel of Mum’s car.

I don’t feel ready to go home yet, so I drive on past Mum’s towards Angel’s Bay and pull over when I see a postbox. I take the two envelopes out of my bag. One is addressed to Dr. Rossi at her Plymouth office and contains the thank-you card from Grace, and the other, with the photo, to Mr. Charlie Nichols at Resthaven Nursing Home. I wrote a brief note to send with each of them, explaining that I’d found the card and the photo and that it felt right to pass them on. I’d signed off “Kind regards” followed with my best signature. It all felt quite formal. My hand pauses in the mouth of the postbox. Suddenly I don’t want to let them go, as though by dropping the envelopes I’d be letting another part of Grace disappear. I pull my hand back and stare at the addresses. What if I didn’t post them but gave them to Dr. Rossi and Charlie in person instead? They’re both in Plymouth, after all, and I don’t have anything else to do now I don’t need to go back to the pub any time soon. Maybe Dr. Rossi would tell me more about the Grace and Meg she knew over coffee. I could curl up in an armchair opposite Charlie, like I used to with my granddad, and listen to his stories about what Grace was like as a baby. It would be a small, good thing I can do. I feel a bit better, lighter. I picture Grace smiling, glad that I’m going to meet these people who, at one time at least, were important to her.

Full of memories of me and Grace, I walk along the beach to while away a couple of hours, and by the time I get home Mum is sitting at the kitchen table chewing the end of a pen and staring fixedly at an unmarked piece of paper in front of her. She gets up, relieved to have a distraction, kisses me, tilts her head to look at me, hugs me, and kisses me again.