“What about Dad?” Lily’s voice was low and flat as though she’d ironed all the creases before letting it out.

“What do you mean? What about Dad?”

“I heard you. After Zoe’s funeral. I heard you tell Dad what you’d done. I know he was furious with you. And I can’t help thinking . . .”

“What? What can’t you help thinking?”

A slow trickle of tears fell down Lily’s cheeks. Audrey smoothed her thumb over the back of Lily’s hand, wondering whether she could ever soothe away a past that had, for so long, contaminated the present.

“I should have said something. I should have stopped you. Because if I had . . .”

“If you had what?”

Lily didn’t speak for a few seconds and when she did, the words sounded small, far away, as though they belonged not to the forty-three-year-old woman sitting next to Audrey on a bench in Central Park but to the teenager who’d first thought them almost three decades before.

“If I’d stopped you then you wouldn’t have needed to confess to Dad and he’d never have got so angry and maybe he’d still be alive today.” The tears dropped, one after the other, onto the pale gray silk of Lily’s skirt where they dilated into large, dark circles.

“Lily, Dad’s death was not your fault. If anyone’s responsible for Dad’s suicide, it’s me, not you. It was not your job to stop me doing what I did. And it was certainly not your job to stop Dad doing what he did. You were fifteen, Lily. Fifteen. Two years younger than Phoebe is now. You were just a child. You are not responsible.”

Audrey put her arms around Lily and held her tight, hoping that somehow, in the closeness of their embrace, Lily might find enough love to forgive herself. “I’m sorry, Lily. I’m so sorry I didn’t do more to help you come to terms with it.”

They sat holding one another as all the years of lonely guilt began to seep out through Lily’s tears. As the sun beat down on them, Audrey wondered whether there might be a way for it to burn through the secrets that had poisoned her family for decades.

As they sat there, a single desire nudged its way into Audrey’s thoughts: the possibility that perhaps it wasn’t too late to rewrite this story with a different ending. “Lily, I know this is all still very raw, but do you think you could do something for me?”

Lily turned to her, mascara smudged across her mottled skin.

“Can you go and find Jess, talk to her, try to sort this out? It’s all such a mess of misunderstandings. None of this ever needed to happen.” The truth scorched Audrey’s throat: all those wasted years because of a collection of tales told in lieu of the truth.

“But you need to talk to her too, Mum. You need to tell her your side of the story.”

An image flashed into Audrey’s mind: three little girls—Lily aged nine, the twins aged four—playing in the garden, the sun streaming through the leaves on the trees as Lily tried to teach her little sisters how to perform handstands. Zoe and Jess—their faces almost indistinguishable—placing their palms flat on the grass, kicking their legs into the air only to have them tip straight back to earth. Frustration mounting until Lily took their ankles, lifted them up, delivered them their moment of assisted triumph. The twins returning to their feet and hugging their big sister, arms around her waist, and her taking their hands, forming a circle with them, dancing and singing. Audrey watching from the kitchen window knowing that of all the relationships her girls must cherish throughout their lives, those sibling bonds were the ones she hoped would see them through to the end of their days.