Outside came the sound of footsteps on the garden path, a pause, then a tumble of post that appeared through the letter box and landed in a heap on the doormat. No doubt more notes of comfort, of sorrow, from people Emily had never met. Handwritten notes from grieving fans—all of them detailing how amazing and talented her grandmother had been. Every one packed with personal stories of how her books had helped excite their early imaginations.

Emily went into the hall and bent down to retrieve the post, began to sort them into piles of letters and junk, catalogs and bills, when the shrill sound of a telephone disturbed the quiet. The answerphone clicked on to record.

“Emily, darling, it’s Charlie.” A woman’s voice crossed the distance from London to Norfolk, and Emily could picture the person on the other end of the line, seated in a large, bright office on the twenty-second floor of a skyscraper overlooking the river Thames. “Look, I’m sorry to keep asking you the same question, but I’m being pressured by the board to put out a press release about this damn manuscript.” There was a long sigh, and Emily closed her eyes, waited for what she sensed was coming. “Are you there? I know you don’t want to talk about this, but at some point you’re going to have to answer all these questions about Catriona, about her life. It doesn’t have to be in person, but you owe it to the fans—”

The room fell silent as Emily pulled the answerphone’s plug from its socket, then threw it to the floor, where it landed on the carpet with a soft thud. She looked down at the letters clasped tightly in her hand before walking into the living room and over to the fireplace, where she tossed them all into the grate. Next, she went back out to the hall to retrieve a large cardboard box by the front door, taking it back to the fireplace and opening the lid. Inside were hundreds of fan letters, most of them unopened.

I don’t want your pity, Emily thought as she began to take them out and stack them in four neat piles by the fire.

Emily had never before wanted to run away, had in fact done everything she possibly could to stay within the safe confines of Wells-next-the-Sea, a happy little town on the Norfolk coast where life moved at a suitably slow pace and the wider world largely left her alone. That was, until her grandmother had given that interview, telling the world and everyone in it that there was, quite possibly, another manuscript ready and waiting for all to discover. There had been such an incredible frenzy after the article was published, with phone calls and emails and strangers turning up at the door, thrusting phones in Emily’s face and asking her if it was true. The kind of chaos Emily had been sheltered from when her grandmother was alive. But she didn’t have any answers, neither then nor now, because she hadn’t asked her grandmother about the unfinished story. It was beginning to feel as if she had never asked her anything of importance, and now it was too late.