‘Eliza, I was the censor,’ Maxie said. ‘I’m sorry. I wanted to make sure you were old enough.’

‘I’m thirty, Maxie.’

‘I know. What Olivia’s trying to tell you is that Jeannie told us she’d made a bet with herself to see how many men of different nationalities she could sleep with during her travels. That’s what some of the postcards are about. I wasn’t ever going to include those in your present. Just the general ones about her travels.’

‘Eliza, you don’t have to read any of them yet if you don’t want to,’ Olivia said. ‘Bring them back to Edinburgh with you. We can read them together. When we sit down to answer your questions.’

There was a long pause before Eliza spoke again. ‘Thank you. Maxie, the red cushions on the sofa – do they belong to you and Hazel or should they stay in the flat?’

‘She’s upset with us, isn’t she?’ Maxie said as soon as Olivia hung up. ‘Angry. You heard her. She reacted as if we’d deliberately been keeping them from her.’

‘We had been.’

‘We hadn’t, Liv. It was just never the right time to show her. This is all my fault. I should have thrown them out years ago. Or brought them up here like you asked. Oh, why didn’t I remember!’

Olivia wasn’t in the mood for Maxie’s dramatics. ‘We’ve taken her by surprise, that’s all. She was about to find them anyway, remember. Of course she’ll want to read them. We just needed to warn her they were there.’

‘But I didn’t get to re-read them all. What if there’s something in them we don’t want her to know?’

Olivia didn’t reply. She was asking herself the same question.

Eliza was no longer near the sofa. She’d gone looking for the postcards as soon as the call with her godmothers ended. She found them in the back of a cupboard in the study. Dozens of them. The bundle was held together by an old shoelace.

She sat on the floor, slowly untied the shoelace, picked up the first postcard and began to read.

At first she was cautious. Then confused. As she kept reading, eventually a new feeling started to bubble up. It felt strangely like excitement. Hardly any of the tales on the postcards matched the travel stories her mother had told her. But the more she read, the more she was realising something. She hadn’t heard all her mother’s stories after all.