‘Hey, champ,’ she grinned, ruffling his hair as he leaned in to her briefly by way of greeting.

‘Hey.’

‘You look like you were hibernating, not sleeping!’

He grinned as he shook his cereal, already on the counter, into a bowl. ‘It’s ‘cos it’s so quiet here.’

‘I know. Good, huh?’ She squinted at him suspiciously. ‘Have you grown?’

His mouth turned up in a lopsided smile at the tease. ‘You’ve only been gone three days.’

‘Yeah, well, I missed you,’ she said, ruffling his head again as she picked up the pyjamas and toys. ‘Now, I’m going to put these away. Have you made your bed?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Not yet. I only just got out of it.’

‘Okay, well, when you’re finished eating, do that and we can make a plan for the day. I think we should let Mamma have a day to herself, don’t you?’

She looked to Hanna for clarification that was okay, to find her boss looking back at her with a grateful stare that bordered on desperate.

‘Great. Well then, get your thinking cap on for where to go.’

‘I want to find the hidden beach.’

Bell rolled her eyes. The great, apocryphal hidden beach of the archipelago. An off-the-cuff comment made by Max once – that he’d played there as a child – had led to endless quests by the children (Linus, really) ever since, to try to locate it. Max had long since forgotten which island his parents had taken him to, and Bell was personally convinced no such thing existed; just a little boy’s imagination and a grown man’s nostalgia. ‘Okay. Well, you can lead the way. I appoint you chief orienteer.’

She wandered down the corridor and tidied away, pulling the duvets up on the girls’ cot beds, opening their blinds and folding their pyjamas. Linus’s room looked like it had been hit by a meteor. She stood at the door for a moment, staring in with weary despair.

A blue asthma inhaler was on the floor, and she went to pick it up. He and the girls sometimes became wheezy in the cold or when they had chest colds and because they only had one, Hanna always liked to keep it in the same place so that they would know where it was in case of an emergency.

She walked through to Hanna’s room and slipped it back into the bedside drawer, automatically going to close it again when something caught her eye, a glint of ice winking from beneath an old photograph. She reached for it and gasped – almost screamed with happy delight, in fact. But something made her catch the words in her mouth and hold them there. She stood, staring for a moment at the long, narrow box beside it and all that it implied . . . Then she closed the drawer again softly, walked back out of the bedroom and through the cabin to the kitchen. ‘Hanna, I found the ring.’