How did you recover from a loss so large you could barely believe it? Grief crept up in quiet moments, swamping her like a river in flood. She missed her mother, who’d been patient and kind, so different from Father. He had always been hard and unyielding, but he’d loved her in his own way, and Miki missed him too. At night, she imagined her parents in their burning bedroom. Father trying to help Mother out of bed. The ceiling falling in. Mother’s nightie catching fire. Their cries for help drowned by the voice of the flames.

The morning after the blaze, while the chickens pecked around on the lawn, Miki and Kurt had waited for the authorities to leave, then they’d picked through the ruins of the farmhouse, looking for something that had been spared. But there had been nothing left. The scorched chimney. Mounds of twisted tin. Rows of concrete stumps. Bits of molten metal. Glass, melted smooth. Among the rubble, Miki had found the tarnished face of the mantelpiece clock, a broken doll’s hand, warped and dinted coins. Holding these things in her soot-smeared hands, she had wept. She could have been walking on her parents’ bones.

She had been destroyed by the fire, but life was insistent. In the bed of ashes left behind, a small seed had germinated and fragile fronds of a new beginning had started to unfold. Miki likened herself to a young tree, finding its way to the light. Those first few days, she and Kurt had lived in the shed, eating eggs and tins of baked beans heated in a pan over the gas cooker the men used for melting wax to graft shoots in the orchard. Once or twice, Miki had seen a car drive slowly by, possibly neighbours. But no one came in. Visitors to the farm had never been encouraged.

On the third day, Miki had huddled in a nest of blankets, while Kurt pored over the papers from the black leather folder he’d saved from the fire. She’d asked to see the papers too, but he had waved her away, saying she didn’t need to worry about such things; he would take care of it. But she kept thinking of Father and that folder, how important it had been to him, the way he’d carried it with as much respect as his Bible. He’d never left it lying around, and she hadn’t known where he’d kept it—so how had Kurt known where to find it?