All her life she has suffered from recurring, bizarre nightmares of being pulled towards a Gothic house near the sea by an unknown force. Alone, she would always take the stairs towards a red door at the top of the house, reach for the handle. Always waking, sobbing, before she could see what was on the other side of the door. But this dream about her father was the most vivid she has ever experienced. It was as though he visited her from the grave to warn her.

Warn her about what?

She closes her eyes, searching her thoughts. She has always felt as though a part of her is missing, something lurking in the background that she has never been able to make sense of. She tried talking to her father about it many times – begging him to tell her more about who her mother was, what she was like, about their life before they came to Whitby – but he always shut her off, even got angry on occasions. In the end she stopped trying. Didn’t want to upset him. Or was it more than that? Maybe she’d backed down, too afraid to learn the truth.

She forces herself out of bed, grabs her dressing gown, and makes her way downstairs.

‘Here you go, boy,’ Alice says, placing Henry’s food in front of him, her face contorting with tears. He sniffs it and returns to his basket. ‘You should eat, sweetheart.’ But she knows how he feels. She can’t face breakfast either.

She makes a mug of coffee, lets Henry out into the tangled, frosty garden, before turning on her laptop. Everything about today feels slow, sluggish, as though she’s entered another dimension.

It doesn’t take many clicks on her keyboard to find the news of her father’s death and his true identity has broken. Everyone seems to know now that E. H. Membrose – reclusive millionaire and bestselling author of Where Doves Fly and Raging Fires – was her father – Adam Hadley. It appears to be the most exciting news to break in the literary industry since Robert Galbraith turned out to be J.K. Rowling.

Alice covers her mouth, trying to take in what she’s reading – seeing. Her father’s face is all over the internet; journalists excited – the secret author’s outing seeming on a par with discovering Lord Lucan’s whereabouts, or Jack the Ripper’s true identity.

Her dad’s eyes – one green, one blue – stare out at her from her laptop screen. Every media giant is running the story; #membrose and #secretauthor are trending on Twitter.

‘Oh God,’ she whispers, her heart thudding as she notices reams of messages on her phone. She grabs a tissue, dabs her face.