My throat felt parched and dry, and I rolled off the bed and padded into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water. I thought about how Pa had hoped that I, armed with my unique skills, would step out confidently into the new dawn he was sure was coming. And back then, I’d thought that was almost certainly what I would do too. Apart from anything else, I’d been desperate to make him proud of me.

But as with so many people, life had happened to me and sent me spinning off my planned trajectory. And instead of providing a launch pad into the wider world, my skill-set had enabled me to hide away in my childhood home.

Whenever my sisters fluttered in from their varying existences across the world, they would tease me about my reclusive life. They told me I was in danger of ending up an old maid, for how was I ever to meet someone if I refused to set foot outside Atlantis?

‘You’re so beautiful, Maia. Everyone who meets you says the same, and yet you sit here alone and waste it,’ Ally had chided me the last time I’d seen her.

And it was probably true that it was my outer packaging that made me stand out in a crowd. Coming from a family of six sisters, we’d all been given our labels when we were younger, the key features that made us special:

Maia, the beauty; Ally, the leader; Star, the peacemaker; CeCe, the pragmatist; Tiggy, the nurturer; and Electra, the fireball.

The question was this: had the gifts we’d each been given brought us success and happiness?

Some of my sisters were still very young and hadn’t lived enough of their lives for them to know, or for me to judge. But for myself, I knew that my ‘gift’ of beauty had helped to bring about the most painful moment of my life, simply because I was too naive at the time to understand the power it wielded. So now, I hid it away, which meant hiding myself.

When Pa had been to visit me in the Pavilion lately, he’d often asked me if I was happy.

‘Of course, Pa.’ I’d always answered in the affirmative. After all, outwardly I had little reason not to be. I lived in total comfort, with two pairs of loving arms only a stone’s throw away. And the world, technically, was my oyster. I had no ties, no responsibilities . . . yet how I longed for them.

I smiled as I thought of Pa, only a couple of weeks ago, encouraging me to visit my old schoolfriend in London. And because it was Pa who suggested it, and I’d spent my adult life feeling that I’d disappointed him, I agreed. Even if I couldn’t be ‘normal’, I hoped he’d think I was if I went.

And so I’d gone to London . . . and returned to find that he had gone too. Forever.