‘I’m a master storyteller, if I do say so myself. Did she tell you I was also winched up into the helicopter, when it wasn’t safe to land? And that there was a glitch and I had to travel fifty kilometres swinging from the rescue rope like a trapeze artist, until they pulled me up properly?’

‘Jeannie, she believes every word you tell her. I really think you —’

Jeannie interrupted. ‘She’s a child, Olivia. My story-loving child. She also believes in giant peaches, chocolate factories, lands at the tops of trees and chairs that grow wings. Should I stop reading those books to her too? Only read her bedtime tales from Encyclopaedia Britannica?’

Olivia backed down. Jeannie had been surprisingly fierce. She knew what she was doing, she insisted. She was nurturing Eliza’s imagination. Giving her a childhood filled with fun, stories and adventures. All that Olivia knew Jeannie hadn’t experienced in her own childhood. She’d only met Jeannie’s parents twice during their school days. She’d been struck by how cold they were. How formal.

Jeannie’s stories continued, many colourful ones about Eliza’s father among them. Olivia and Maxie often discussed it. They felt it wasn’t fair to fill Eliza’s head with elaborate stories of a father who was an astronaut, or a circus performer, or whatever occupation took Jeannie’s fancy at the time. They’d carefully raised that with her too. Jeannie laughed it off.

‘It’s just a bit of fun. I told you, I’ve promised to tell her everything when she’s eighteen. Not just about her father. All my dark secrets. You have to promise not to say a word to her until then, too.’

They’d promised. They’d kept their promise. It was Jeannie who had been unable to keep hers, through the cruellest of circumstances.

They had been such terrible, dark days. Eliza was inconsolable. There was the added distress of an autopsy and coroner’s report being ordered, due to the tragic circumstances. Jeannie’s funeral finally took place, the weather as bleak as their hearts, the gathering in the country church surprisingly large for a small town. Jeannie’s colleagues from the supermarket. Teachers and classmates from Eliza’s school. Throughout it all, the two of them tried to keep Eliza afloat, while dazed with shock themselves. Every night, the sound of her weeping filling the house. Every day, her initial shock turning into the deepest of grief. The plaintive questions that broke their hearts. ‘Was it my fault?’ ‘Did I do something wrong?’ And even more heartbreakingly: ‘What if I forget her?’

‘You never will, darling, I promise. Never. We’ll always help you remember her.’ Olivia clearly recalled saying it, holding the seventeen-year-old Eliza tightly.

‘We’ll always be here for you, Eliza,’ Maxie had said. ‘We promise.’

Each day, Eliza asked them to keep telling her the stories about Jeannie. It had been so urgent, almost panicked. ‘Which ones?’ Olivia remembered Maxie asking. The one when the three of you shoplifted the chocolate and the nuns made you crawl on your hands and knees to return it to the shop. The one when she went backpacking around Europe and she slept on a beach and woke up to find a snake in her sleeping bag.