There was another picture in her head too, of a little girl seated in a wheelchair with the cockatoo perched on her shoulder. She was whispering to him, gently stroking his breast and watching as ripples of color passed from the bird and onto her skin. For no matter the pictures that Emily was asked to draw, her imagination always seemed to bring her back to Ophelia, the iconic character her grandmother had created all those years ago.

“Cacatuidae,” Emily sounded out the Latin term for the bird as she wrote it underneath the branch he was perched on. She spoke slowly, feeling her way through each syllable, and realized it was the first time she had said anything out loud for days.

The whole point of agreeing to the illustrations was that it was supposed to be distracting her from the fact she was all by herself. Naively, she had thought a new project would be all it took to fill the hours of the day, when she otherwise had nothing in particular to do and nowhere to go.

The song on the radio changed, the velvet notes of a clarinet playing Peter and the Wolf, which filled Emily’s mind with a picture of a boy running through the snow, longing to get back home where his mother was waiting with a turkey on the table and presents under the tree.

I’m sorry, she thought, looking at the cockatoo as she turned the radio off, before closing the sketchbook and tidying away the pots of ink. It would seem you’re destined to be decidedly ordinary after all.

Emily had spent years creating illustrations that were anything but ordinary. Her pictures were filled with fantasy and make-believe, designed to bring to life the incredible stories her grandmother had written. But ever since her grandmother’s death, Emily had found herself unable to concentrate on anything new.

She looked across to the room that led off the kitchen, her grandmother’s study. One wall was taken over by shelves filled with dozens of her grandmother’s red notebooks, which contained all the ideas for every book she had written about Ophelia and her pet duck. Ten books in all, no more, no less. But now the whole world seemed to think there was another, one that Emily knew there had never been time to write.

How could she do this? Emily thought to herself. The doctors had said there was still time. Time to finish her work. Time to seek out another possible treatment.

Time to fight.

Her grandmother was the one person in the world who understood. Who had shared in the misery of losing both parents in a car crash so many seasons ago and the pain of Emily’s subsequent recovery. She was the only person who had been there throughout the years of cruel taunts from children who were supposed to be her friends.

She had promised to love Emily, to take care of her always. But now her grandmother, the famous Catriona Robinson, couldn’t protect anyone.