Pulling another framed photograph free of its wrapping, she was greeted by Edward and his parents staring back at her. In the center of the photograph, Lily lay swaddled in Edward’s arms, his parents standing stiffly on either side of them in front of a Christmas tree. Turning over the frame, she found her handwriting scrawled across the back: Barnsbury Square, Christmas 1972. Her and Edward’s first Christmas as a married couple, their first as parents, their first in their own home.

As her eyes roamed from one person to the next she searched, as she had so many times over the years, for any hint in those time-frozen expressions of what was to come. But all Audrey could see was her father-in-law’s rigid social etiquette, her mother-in-law’s sour grimace, and Edward’s joy in the six-week bundle of perfection he held.

Looking at the photograph, Audrey wondered how Edward’s parents would have coped with what happened sixteen years after that picture had been taken. The year her and Edward’s lives had changed irreparably, the ground rupturing beneath them, sucking them deep into a sinkhole from which they would never truly emerge. She wondered how his parents would have borne the grief, the anger and the shame, how it had been a blessing, really, that neither of them had lived long enough to witness it. Sometimes Audrey envied them their ignorance, envied them being spared the guilt, the confusion, and the litany of unanswered questions that had plagued her all these years.

She tilted her head from side to side, trying to iron out her thoughts. She couldn’t allow herself to think about Edward today when so many different feelings were already competing for attention. And yet, for the past five months, ever since a routine mammogram had detected a lump in her breast—a lump that had led to the discovery of secondary tumors in her liver and cancer in her lymph nodes—Audrey had become preoccupied with the past. Knowing she would most likely be dead in eighteen months’ time had caused the floodgates to open on memories she had spent decades trying to forget.

She gripped the solid black finial at the end of the bed and ordered herself to stop thinking. But as she leaned forward and pulled the packing tape from the top of the next box, she remembered sitting around the kitchen table nearly three decades before, feeling the air thicken with a tension she could neither cut through nor explain, as Jess glared at Lily and refused to tell anyone why suddenly she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as her sister.

Chapter 2

Jess

Standing in front of a small square monitor, watching actors repeat their lines for an eighth time, Jess rubbed the back of her neck where the muscles had compressed into tight knots. Halfway through his final speech, the male actor stumbled on words he’d already fluffed seven times, and Jess sensed a murmur of exasperation among the crew.

She’d known when she arrived on set at six o’clock that morning—before anyone else, as was her responsibility as senior location manager—that today would be one of those days. First-day shoots on new drama shows invariably were: the cast adjusting to performing outside the rehearsal room, crews reestablishing acquaintances from previous jobs or forming new alliances. There was always a tense anticipation, like the moments before the first guests arrive at a party you’re hosting.