‘Enough!’ her mum had said, pushing her away and standing up, leaving Eva gaping in shock. Her mum was everything to her. She didn’t want to make her angry, she hadn’t meant to. She’d have stopped her lip wobbling if she knew how. Her mum had come and knelt down in front of her. ‘It’s OK,’ she’d whispered. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout.’ But after that, Eva stopped asking. Even as a teenager, it was the one subject she knew not to approach. And now? Whatever the history of their beautiful house, it had been home to Avigail and Eva Goldsmith, and that was all she needed to know.

Downstairs a large living-dining room ran the length of the house, with bay windows looking over the herbs in the front garden and glass doors opening onto a patio in the back. Paved with red and grey stones, weeds long since settled in between them, it led to the wonderfully overgrown wilderness that stretched all the way down to the stream. She didn’t use it as a living-dining room though; instead she had her piano in there, and some of her mum’s old paintings on the walls. There were layers upon layers of wallpaper. She’d peeled back a corner once to find an emerald-green stripe, and something with roses in red and gold beneath that. The top layer was pale blue with curved grey branches and light pink cherry blossom. With the dark wood floor and large, empty space, she liked it. Besides, it had been her mum’s favourite room. Aside from the piano and the old sofa in the corner, the only piece of furniture was the roll-top desk, and Eva found herself looking at it now, her fingers running over the curved slats before turning the key in the small lock.

She wanted to find out what was behind the new advertising campaign. There had to be some motivation there – financial? political? Once she knew why they were doing it, perhaps she’d be able to work out how she felt about it. But she didn’t want to start by looking through her own correspondence. It was all too … polite. FullLife had always responded to her emails, given answers to her queries about specific aspects of the technology, the statistics. She’d been given no reason to suspect they were doing anything wrong, or that they were lying to anyone.