Brody had a daughter?

Anna’s mind reeled. How had she been talking to him all this time without knowing this? But she didn’t have time to ponder that question, because Brody carried on, his tone flat like a newsreader’s.

‘Katri used to get migraines, and all that time stuck in traffic had set one off, so she went to have a lie-down as soon as we arrived at my parents’ house. They lived in a tiny hamlet, not quite as remote as where I am now, but almost. They’ve sold the house since, but one of the reasons they bought it was that it had a beautiful garden enclosed with dry-stone walls. At the back of the house there was a patio, and then a lawn that sloped gently down to a large pond, maybe thirty feet across. It was beautiful that day,’ he added wistfully, ‘full of spring colour.’

He painted the picture so skilfully that Anna could see it in her head: the climbing roses, the neatly clipped grass, the bright, fresh leaves on the trees.

‘Mum put the kettle on, as she always did when we arrived, and she suggested that after being cooped up in the car we went and sat outside and got some fresh air. I took Lena out there, and I sat at one of the large benches that flanked the oak patio table. She started off on my lap, but it wasn’t long before she was wriggling. There was a ladybird on the back of the chair at the end of the table and she got up to investigate.’ He paused for a moment. Anna could sense him revisiting that memory, letting it play in his head.

‘She was fascinated. She put her face right up to it and watched it crawl around. Poor thing only just managed to fly away before she tried to pick it up. Once it was gone, she skipped around the table, singing to herself. She used to do that all the time, just making up the words as she went along. It was the most beautiful and honest creative expression I’d ever heard. And it made me think about Pip, the main character in my novels, and how she’d lost that same kind of innocence and innate joy, how she’d had to grow up fast and leave her childhood behind.

‘I was about to start the last book in the series at that point, but I was stuck, struggling with her character development – what sort of person she’d end up being at the end of her journey. And listening to Lena sing about the “ladybud” that had flown away, I knew that I couldn’t leave her so fiercely independent, almost adult in her thinking. I realized I had to return her to some of that joyful childishness she’d lost. She needed to be just a girl again. She needed to have fun.

‘I was lost in thought, just staring out over the garden, when I suddenly realized the singing had stopped. I couldn’t hear Lena anymore.’