When Anna wrote her will, she’d have had this exact scene in her mind. She must have known we’d climb the stairs to open the shutters and that we’d stand here, in the sunlight. She was probably imagining that Joe and I would fall into one another’s arms and then be grateful to her for reuniting us. If that was the case, then she could hardly have been more wrong. But if, by bringing me here, she had inadvertently given me the means to bring Daniel closer to me, then I would make the most of every second I’d been given.

14

While Joe removed the planks from the downstairs windows, I opened the upstairs windows and shutters, letting light into rooms that had been dark for years. I gazed out across acres of gardens, which we hadn’t yet explored, looking for the little graveyard, but the gardens were so overgrown it was a hopeless task.

From the rear bedrooms, I could see the old swimming pool, a derelict hole in the shape of two interlocking circles, one large, one small, surrounded by concrete tiles, and an abandoned pool house in the centre of what now looked like a wildflower meadow but probably used to be a fine lawn. I could imagine Joe and his friends playing in that pool: dive-bombing one another, seeing who could hold their breath the longest, sunning themselves around it. I could imagine Valentina there, a playful young girl, peering over the top of her sunglasses. I could picture Anna, standing where I was standing, watching the youngsters at a distance, enjoying their happiness. I wondered if, back then, she had any premonition of what might become of Joe; the terrible direction his life would take because of her. I wondered if, sensitive as she was to the past, she ever intuited my future presence, the former daughter-in-law who hated her.

When the upstairs windows were all open, Joe called me down and we went through the ground floor rooms together. The villa had been closed up with care, and carefully we set about reopening it. Years of darkness meant the colours on the soft furnishings hadn’t faded. The rooms were tidy: good furniture shrouded in dust sheets; glasses and ornaments put away in cupboards to keep them clean.

I was awed by the stillness inside those rooms, the huge chandeliers, the beautiful old paper on the walls. I walked through the villa, hearing my footsteps, my heartbeat, not spooked exactly but unwilling to look too closely at the white sheets that covered the furniture – they looked as if they might undrape themselves at any moment and in the extremes of bright light and dark shadows it was difficult to guess what lay beneath.