The marker stones were at the foot of one of the largest trees in the garden, an oleaster with a muscular grey trunk. Not much would grow in its shade. This would have been a quiet, forlorn place, somewhere for Anna’s mother to sit and mourn her dead babies; somewhere for Anna to come and play. Perhaps she asked her mother about the inscription. Perhaps her mother told her it meant that death was not eternal. Perhaps that was why Anna found it so easy to resurrect her siblings in her imagination.

I crouched beside the graves. If this was where the lost DeLuca children played, was there a chance that Daniel might be here too?

Daniel’s body had been buried in a woodland graveyard in the Yorkshire countryside, close to a campsite we used to frequent as a family in the holidays. It was a part of England Joe, Daniel and I loved, where we used to go to escape the stress and busyness of London. It was somewhere that only held happy memories for us; somewhere Anna had never been and I’d been determined to keep my baby away from cold, grey, London churchyards and the dismal tolling of bells. But it had been a mistake laying our child to rest so far from home. It made visiting his grave difficult; not something that could be done on a whim so those times when I missed Daniel so much that I thought I would die could not be alleviated by the ritual of going to his grave. And when I was there, although the tree we’d planted above Daniel’s body thrived, I never had any sense of my son being nearby.

But here; this was different. Here, in the grounds of the villa, it felt as if the boundaries between life and death were blurred. It felt as if the history of the DeLucas was so strong, that anything might be possible.

I stayed very still. I listened. The heat was so strong that morning that I felt it like a heartbeat; the air was treacly with it. I was as still as an insect preserved in amber, my senses alert. I closed my eyes. I tried to feel my boy, tried to bring him to me. I heard a subtle movement in the plants around me and adrenaline rushed through my veins. I caught my breath.

‘Daniel?’ I whispered. ‘Are you there?’

There was a sound like a child’s laughter, close; a soft sigh and a rush of cool air that touched my arm and the side of my face and disappeared. It was over in a second and the heat slid back and it brought with it the stillness of the day. I waited a few minutes more, but nothing more happened; nobody else came.