Flicking through the pages, Emily’s eyes scanned the mind maps, random words, and snippets of conversation that often made up the opening pages of her grandmother’s notebooks. But then the pages simply stopped, because someone had ripped them from the spine, leaving behind thin lines of paper, like crocodile teeth grinning back at her.

“She told me she hid the rest,” the bookseller said as he stepped closer and pointed to the missing pages. “Somewhere only you would be able to find it.”

But, as far as Emily was concerned, Catriona Robinson had never finished this book. Or had she? Because the months before she died were spent in her study, supposedly setting her affairs in order, and Emily had naturally assumed this was the case. Could it be that this is what she had spoken of before her death? Had she spent that time writing another story, one that Emily was now being sent out to find?

“Why hide it?” Emily muttered, looking from the notebook to the rest of the books on the floor. Bending down, she picked up the last book and flicked through the first few pages. Emily paused as she came to the final illustration in the book, one of Ophelia sitting at her kitchen table and eating an enormous slice of birthday cake. The words of the new dedication swirled through her mind, bringing with them the memory of where Ophelia originally discovered the magical atlas.

Years before, on the first birthday Emily had spent in Norfolk with her grandmother, they, too, had been sitting at the breakfast table, listening to the radio and deciding what to do with their day, when someone knocked on the front door. Emily had hidden behind the fridge, peeping round to see Catriona answer the door to a postman holding a large, square box.

“Come and see,” Catriona had said as she placed the box on the table and slit it open with a kitchen knife. Inside was another, smaller box, this one made from pale-blue cardboard and tied up with a satin bow. Emily had watched as her grandmother opened the second box to reveal a cake decorated with glistening chocolate swirls.

“Would you like a piece?” she had asked, using the same kitchen knife to slice through the soft sponge. Emily had shaken her head, because the sponge was a deep red, not the chocolate brown she had been expecting. In response, her grandmother had offered up a nonchalant shrug and used her finger to wipe the blade of the knife clean, then licking off the butter cream icing.

“If you don’t try, you’ll never know.”

Every year since, a red velvet cake was delivered to the cottage in Norfolk. It was sent all the way from Fortnum and Mason in London, next to which a rather famous bookshop could be found.

“No,” Emily gasped, and the book she was holding dropped to the floor with a soft thud, its cover facing up to show a little girl and her pet duck skipping through a snow-covered forest.