‘Puppets are a Sicilian thing. There’s a puppet theatre here somewhere. Don’t you remember Anna telling Daniel about it? How she used to like to play with it, making up stories?’

I winced at hearing Daniel’s name mentioned in the same breath as Anna’s. I tried so hard to keep them separate in my mind. When love and bitterness met inside me, they curdled like vinegar and milk.

Joe said he was going to walk up the hill to find a phone signal so he could call the estate agent ‘to get things moving’.

While he was gone, I wandered out into the garden. The morning was beautiful as ever; the sky as blue. The birds were singing and I glimpsed the little cat hunting in the undergrowth. I followed it, pushing aside swathes of overgrown foliage with my hand as it crept its secret trails. The cat disturbed butterflies and crickets and soon I lost sight of it amongst the scrubby feet of plants grown wild and strong. I pushed my way past some kind of creeper with papery, purple flowers, the petals folded around bright orange stamens that released a musky scent. Twines caught around my ankles. I didn’t know in which direction I was moving. I could not hear the sea, only the singing of the insects and the sound of my own heartbeat. It was like being a child again, or a character in a fairy tale; I was lost.

I wandered for a while, knowing that sooner or later the vista would open up and I’d be able to work out where I was. Eventually, I stood on something hard and when I pushed away the dead leaves that covered it, I saw it was a grave marker, lying flat. The name on the stone was Elena DeLuca. I hadn’t been consciously looking for the part of the garden where Anna’s stillborn brother and sisters had been laid to rest but had been drawn towards it anyway. I scraped away dirt and pebbles and I found the other two graves. One for Custanti, one for Giosepa. Beneath Giosepa’s name was the inscription: E la morte non avrà più dominio. Although it was in Italian, the phrase was familiar enough for me to guess it meant: And death shall have no dominion. I had studied the Dylan Thomas poem of the same name at school.