Another picture turned out to be a close-up and not a landscape shot – it was a close-up of a snow globe, and there was a quarter of a face in the right side of the frame. A woman’s face. I guessed it must have been Aurelia, and that Gaia had taken the photograph. Still, she’d framed it. I found myself paying more and more attention to that photograph, deliberately taking the long way to the kitchen in order to pass it. I was curious about Aurelia. Not just because she was the mother of the two girls I was falling in love with, but somehow because she had passed through a door that I had only knocked on. The door of suicide. We both understood something of the grim path that leads to that door, but Aurelia had had so much more to lose than I had. She must have known it, too. She had a beautiful family, a stunning home in London, and then this dream home out here in Norway. The photographs were a little out there for my taste, but she was clearly a talented woman. Talented, rich, surrounded by people who loved her.

Why would she kill herself?

And as though she could read the thoughts turning over in my head like pages, Gaia started to bring up her mother more often. It was less of the ‘Mummy’s gone to heaven’ kind of statements and more about her mummy running away.

‘Your mummy didn’t run away,’ I told her gently one night, as I was settling her into bed. A farcical move, really, when we both knew she’d be creeping back into my bed a handful of minutes afterwards. ‘Your mummy is in heaven, my darling. And heaven is very comfy. Like a big soft bed made of clouds, with unicorns and rainbows and long summer days.’

She took off her glasses and set them on the nightstand. ‘No,’ she said, rubbing the worry doll I’d made her out of an old tablecloth with one hand and clutching her teddy Louis in the other. ‘I saw her. Do you think she went to find the elk?’

She started telling me about how she’d left a bowl of porridge out, but it didn’t work and Mummy might have found her friend again.

I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.

‘Mumma ran away,’ she pouted. ‘I didn’t have my glasses on but I saw her …’

This was new information. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘When did Mummy run away?’

‘It was the last time I saw her,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I saw her running from the house.’

‘Which house?’

‘This house. She ran outside.’

‘Maybe she had to go help your dad with something.’

An emphatic shaking of the head, her chin swinging from shoulder to shoulder. ‘She saw something.’

‘What did she see?’

‘I think she had to go swimming.’

‘Swimming?’