When Valentine reappears from the kitchen we sit down at the table by the window and he pours me tea. The bungalow is quiet, but for the soft ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. A shaft of sunlight shines across the table, illuminating tiny sparkles of dust in the air. There’s a stillness.

‘Helen’s not in Paris, is she?’

There’s a pause. Valentine’s face betrays nothing, but I feel a shift. As if we’re about to cross a line and we can never go back.

‘No, she’s not.’

And then his shoulders collapse and he drops his head. When he finally raises his eyes to meet mine, the look that passes between us confirms what I’ve suspected for a long time.

‘Helen died.’

Valentine

He never set out to lie to anyone.

Not to Olivia. Or the care workers. And certainly not to Gisele.

But he had no choice, you see. He couldn’t bear to see her so upset. To watch her cry when she asked him where her daughter was and he had to tell her the truth. Over and over again. Because she’d always forget. And each time he broke it to her, it was like hearing the news for the first time. They say time is a great healer, but it’s not, when you can’t remember if it happened today or thirty years ago. For Gisele, the shock and the grief were as raw as the morning the police knocked on their door.

In the end he couldn’t bear it any longer. He couldn’t watch her break down every time she asked when her daughter was coming to visit and he had to tell her again and again what had happened. So he made up a story – about Helen being in Paris, visiting Gisele’s sister Agnès and living life to the full. Living the life she never got to live. He filled it with laughter and red wine, and young men who would take Helen dancing. With all the fun and the fancy French fashions, and the pavement cafes and the walks along the Seine, that she should have had. He told Gisele how happy Helen was. How much she loved her. How she’d see her soon.

And he’d been telling it for so long that after a while he almost started to believe it himself.

Of course the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Helen never got to go dancing in jazz clubs, twirled around by some handsome French man, whom he would no doubt have disapproved of and declared not good enough for his daughter. Instead, while away at university, Helen had an asthma attack. It was nothing new, she’d had them before. She’d suffered from asthma as a child and always had to carry an inhaler. Except that night she’d gone to stay at a friend’s house. When she woke in the night to find she couldn’t breathe, she reached into her handbag only to realize that she’d left her inhaler at home. By the time her friend raised the alarm and the ambulance arrived, she’d already gone. Helen was nineteen years old.