Singing along with the rest of the choir, Audrey looked out into the audience. She could see people smiling in the front rows, could hear a note of optimism reverberate around the hall.

Then the song came to an end and there was a fragment of silence, a splinter of time in which anything seemed possible. And then the silence was shattered by a sound so thunderous Audrey almost clamped her hands over her ears. Not just the noise but the feel of it: an eruption of applause that vibrated through the soles of her feet.

Audrey turned to see Phoebe two rows behind her, flushed and beaming. And then she felt someone taking hold of her hand and she turned to find Ben leading her toward the front of the stage, gesturing for her to stand there, alone.

Hands clasped behind her back, Audrey stood listening to the applause before bending her head in an unrehearsed bow. When she straightened up again, it took her a few seconds to understand why the audience looked different: closer, bigger. They were on their feet, not just clapping but cheering.

She turned around, in need of a cue from Ben as to what she should do next, but when she looked behind her, Ben and the rest of the chorus were applauding her too.

Audrey beamed at the audience, savoring every second.

And in that moment she didn’t think about the fact that her life was going to end so much sooner than she wished. She didn’t think about the grains of sand slipping through the hourglass, nor that she had had to wait so long to experience something like this. What mattered to Audrey as she took her fourth and final bow was the incontrovertible knowledge that even at her age—even this close to the end—life still had the capacity to surprise her.

Chapter 42

Jess

“Did you know Granny could sing like that?”

Jess looked at Mia over the top of her menu. Around them, waiters delivered pizzas, salads, bottles of wine, and jugs of water to neighboring tables, the restaurant noisy with Saturday night concertgoers.

She closed the menu, not feeling hungry. She had known she wouldn’t be at ten o’clock on a Saturday night, but Mia had been so keen for them to have dinner together that they were seated in one of the restaurants inside the Royal Albert Hall, waiting for her mum to join them.

“Not really. Having heard her tonight, I remember her singing to us when I was little, but I don’t think I’ve heard her sing since I was a child.” Jess thought back to all those lonely nights she had lain on the bottom bunk, Zoe having moved into the spare room next door as soon as she’d got ill, listening through the wall to her mum singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me” or “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” On days when Zoe was well enough, in the weeks she was allowed home from the hospital during the fourteen months of her illness, their dad would carry her downstairs and they would make up a bed for her on the sofa. Jess would slip under the far end of the duvet, careful not to take up too much space or sit on her twin’s spindly legs, and together they would watch The Wizard of Oz for the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth time. Zoe would laugh at the Tin Man, shout at the Cowardly Lion, and tell Jess not to be silly when she got scared of the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys. And no matter how many times the two of them watched it together, the same thought always went through Jess’s mind: that perhaps somewhere at the end of a rainbow was a pot of gold that could make her sister well again.