Audrey closed the diary and clutched it to her chest. It was too late to repair so many of the things in her life that had been broken: Edward’s untimely death; the grief they had all suffered; the estrangement between Lily and Jess she had been unable to heal. Audrey no longer knew if she accepted her daughters’ rift as the status quo or was wary of probing too deeply for fear of what she might discover at its root.

She picked up the photograph of her girls on Woolacombe Beach. She knew she couldn’t wave a magic wand and bring back loved ones she had lost or undo anyone’s pain. But as she looked again at her daughters’ smiles—their happiness untainted by events that would devastate their lives less than two years after that picture had been taken—she was aware of her heartbeat accelerating, and a quiet determination slipping between her ribs.

If she had eighteen months left to live then she had eighteen months to uncover the cause of Jess’s animosity toward Lily.

“Granny! Dinner’s nearly ready. Mum says she’ll be home in ten minutes.”

Audrey placed the photograph on her bedside table, understanding for the first time why she had chosen to move in with Jess rather than Lily: this was her chance to get close to Jess, to find out the reason for her unhappiness. This was her chance to put her family back together.

As she walked out of the bedroom and onto the landing, Audrey called down the stairs to her granddaughter below. “OK, darling. I’m coming. I’m ready now.”

Part Two

March

Chapter 5

Audrey

Audrey and Phoebe walked arm in arm down a narrow Notting Hill street until they arrived at a 1960s low-rise building that looked unprepossessing from the outside. It was grimy and architecturally at odds with the surrounding Georgian terraces.

“Are you sure this is the right address, Phoebe? It doesn’t look very salubrious.” Audrey stared at the peeling paint on the windowsills and the brown water marks streaking the walls like the tears of a giant.

“Oh, it’s fine. Come on, stop stalling. We’re probably the first ones here.”

As they entered the building and followed the black-and-white signs up the stairs toward the second floor, Audrey wondered—not for the first time in the past two weeks—whether she was being brave and intrepid or simply foolish. She still couldn’t believe she was actually going to go through with it.

It had been just under a month since she’d found her old diary. When she’d mentioned it to Phoebe a week later, during Sunday lunch at Lily’s, her granddaughter’s reaction had taken her by surprise: But don’t you see what finding that diary means, Gran? It means you’ve got a second chance to do all those things. You could sing. You could do a part-time university course. You could travel. This could be awesome.

It was Phoebe who’d come up with the idea of Audrey joining a choir, Phoebe who’d gone online and searched for one that sounded perfect. And now it was Phoebe who was accompanying her to the audition, insisting she wanted to join the choir too, although Audrey found it hard to believe it was how any seventeen-year-old really wanted to spend their free time. But even with Phoebe for moral support, Audrey’s heartbeat still stuttered each time she tried to imagine singing in front of a complete stranger.