Meg sat with the trunk so long that all the light went out of the room. Ditte’s letter lay beside it. Read and reread. One page was creased from when Meg had screwed it up in a rage. Moments later, she’d smoothed it flat again.

Her father knocked at the door, a light, tentative knock. He offered her tea, and she refused. He knocked again and enquired about her state of mind. Quite all right, she said, though she was quite sure she wasn’t. When the hall clock chimed eight, some kind of spell was broken. Meg got up from the chair she’d been sitting in for the past four hours and turned on a lamp. She opened the door to the sitting room and called to her father.

“I’d like that tea now, Dad,” she said. “With a couple of biscuits, if you don’t mind.”

After placing the tray beside her, he poured the tea into her mum’s favourite china cup. He added a slice of lemon, kissed her on the forehead and left the room. There was no mention that dinner had gone cold.

It was three years since the cup had been warmed with tea. Meg held it like her mum had done: cupped in both hands with the handle pointing forward, all in an effort to avoid the small chip on the rim where one would normally sip. The gesture blurred the edges of Meg’s being, and she imagined her elegant fingers as her mother’s fleshy ones, callouses softening under the heat, a hint of earth under the fingernails. Her mother’s short, heavy legs had been a better fit for the armchair than Meg’s long limbs, but Meg had taken to sitting there. Although the day had been hot, she shivered, as her mother often would, when she came in from her garden to share tea.

What would she have made of the trunk? Meg thought. Would she have told her to open it or to keep it shut? It sat on the chaise longue, where it had been all afternoon. Meg looked at it again and thought it had become strangely familiar. “In your own time,” her mum would have said.

Meg finished her tea and eased herself out of the old armchair. She sat on the chaise longue next to the trunk. The latch clicked open with no effort at all, and the lid sprang back.

The Dictionary of Lost Words had been clumsily carved into the inside of the lid. It was a child’s hand, and Meg suddenly realised that the contents were not just that of a woman who had given up her baby, but of a girl who never dreamed that one day she would have to.