It has been a long time and I know you are angry. But I’m asking you to put that aside, if you can, and visit me. There is so much I’d like to tell you. But I will not come knocking on your door. You made your feelings very clear the last time I did that.

It is very beautiful here. I’d like to show you.

The letter had not been signed, but Eva understood. It was from Freida, to her daughter. She knew what that meant. Perhaps she’d known all along. She heard herself breathing as she held the letter. She wanted to be angry with her mum for keeping her family hidden, but she couldn’t do that, it was far too late. It wasn’t a rival they’d come to confront, on that visit to the lighthouse when she was a child. It was her grandmother.

But why hadn’t she opened the door?

Perhaps she was down at the black rocks. The coast that she loved so much.

Eva realised she was holding all the answers she had been searching for. She had found her family, in this graveyard in Edderton, and she had found a way to fight FullLife as well. In the folder she was carrying, she had proof enough for a major court case and a public scandal. But she still wasn’t quite sure what she was trying to achieve.

She’d been telling the truth yesterday, when she’d told Holly that people were dependent on the pouch. People had been helped by it, too. And standing here at her grandmother’s grave, finally knowing the woman who had invented the pouch, she recognised what she owed it. Eva was alive because of the pouch. Her grandmother, though she had never met her, had invented the technology that had saved her life.

Eva wasn’t aware that she was crying, not until she tried to read the words on Freida’s gravestone and found that she could not. Everything was blurred; the snow and the sky, the mountains and the clearest water she had ever seen. Piotr stepped forward and reached out his arm, gently placing it around her shoulders, just like her own arm was still resting around Holly’s. That was how they stood, the three of them, in front of Freida’s grave.

Chapter 19

ALL THE WEBSITES carried news of the protest, and of the tragedy of Will Bhattacharyya. Holly went home to her family, Eva got straight back to work, and Piotr published an article about FullLife’s misguided privacy policy – and Freida’s prediction of the risk of fatality. Suddenly journalists from all over the country were digging deeper. It was like they’d been waiting for permission to speak and now they were speaking, on every topic, from every point of view: