She picks her phone up and smashes it into the mirror, glass shattering all over the room, the reflection of her face falling apart like broken ice. It knocks her bag over, its contents spilling out amongst the glass. With it is Gwyneth’s notepad, which she’d kept in her bag for Lumin. All this time, she’d been reading her cousin’s notepad, travelling the breadth of the country with her cousin’s daughter, her own flesh and blood.

Amber crawls over and carefully retrieves the notepad from the pile of glass. She flicks through it and is surprised to find new sketches in the back, small drawings by Lumin of various sights on their journey to Scotland: the peaks of the Lake District, the pretty farmhouse there, the frozen waterfall, then a face.

Amber’s face.

Lumin had drawn her without her knowing. Amber stares at the sketch of herself, standing proud, a look of defiance on her face, her chin up, her damaged hand held up as though in a fist. Before her, a map of Scotland spreads out.

Is this how she sees me? Amber wonders. A strong defiant character striding across the country to find her truth?

Amber turns to the next page. It’s her again but this time she’s huddled up on a window seat, chin to her knees, her fingerless hand dangling limp and useless at her side. Flung on the floor is the very notepad she’s looking at, with the defiant portrait of her. But it’s unfinished.

Amber flicks between the two.

‘Defiant or powerless,’ she whispers. ‘Which one am I?

She looks down at her mangled hand. Was it really just Gwyneth’s fault?

She catches sight of her reflection in what remains of the mirror. A half-formed thing. One eye, part of a nose, a chin. It reminds her of when she first saw a scan of Katy. She’d had some spotting so she and Jasper went in for an early scan at just eight weeks. There was barely anything there, half-formed. But Katy’s heart beat strong and true. Amber remembers the elation she’d felt at the life that held strong and dear inside her. Jasper had clasped her hand. ‘This one’s a fighter,’ he’d said.

And my God, she was! She really was, right until the end, Katy fought … just as Amber had when she’d been in hospital with hypothermia all those years ago. The doctors had called her the ‘miracle child’. She’d lived when Katy hadn’t.

But what had she done with the life she’d been given? The life that Katy had never got the chance to live? She’d squandered it, feeling sorry for herself, bitter and resentful. That bitterness had made her turn her back on the one man she’d ever really loved.

And it made her stop loving herself too.