Home again, she makes coffee and toast and stands at the window watching the street. It’s a windy day. Leaves chase each other across the pavement. Branches whip and snap. A mother passes with her small daughter, the two of them running, laughing. They have identical hair, Marina notices, a golden-brown, the colour of autumn. Poetry is on her mind. Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’. She recites a few lines. It’s a mournful poem about death and regret.

She finishes her toast, turns away from the window and sits in the armchair thinking about Connie. What if Harry was wrong and she was pregnant? Did he know her that well? Her gaze dwells on the photo of Ruth and David. Her parents. Yet not her parents. She remembers Ron commenting that she looked like David. People see what they want to see. If Harry loved Connie, and was jealous of her relationship with Johnny, the last thing he’d want would be for her to be pregnant. The last thing he’d want to see would be her pregnancy.

Truth and how we see – or fail to see – it. Marina smiles wryly. The poets all had a go at trying to explore truth. She leans across, picks up the volume lying on the table in front of her and holds it carefully, imagining Connie leafing through.

Those lines again, running through her head.

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

She finds Donne in the contents page and then runs her fingertip down the titles of the poems, searching, until one of them chimes – ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’. Turning to the right page, she reads the words to herself and then selects other, equally familiar poems and murmurs them aloud.

The brown dust has settled on her fingertips again and it occurs to Marina that the dust is like ashes and that the book is decaying. She turns the pages more carefully and reaches the end. An envelope is stuck to the inside of the back cover. No name on the front, the paper is yellowing. Did Connie put this here? Gently, she opens the flap. Carefully, she slots her fingers inside. Slowly, she pulls out a single sheet of folded paper and her stomach roils.

And now.

She opens the sheet of paper.

She smooths it out on the table.

It’s a letter, blotched and smudged, written in blue ink with a fountain pen.

She starts to read.

By the time she has finished, tears are streaming down Marina’s face.

She sits stock still in the tatty armchair.

Away in the kitchen, a tap drips into the porcelain sink. Above her Selena is pacing. There is a scratching at the window. Laughter in the street.

A letter. A letter from Connie to Johnny explaining she is pregnant. A letter that, after all these years, confirms who Marina is.