‘Really?’

‘Really.’

For the first time since I’d known her, my fourth sister looked as though she was about to cry.

‘Thank you, Maia,’ she said gratefully. ‘Now, I must go and find Star and tell her that we’re leaving soon.’

As I watched her stand up and walk inside, I thought how Pa’s death had changed all of us already.

An hour later, having handed each sister a copy of the inscription I’d translated for her, I was yet again on the jetty saying goodbye. I watched Ally, CeCe and Star skim across the water in the launch, on their way back to their own lives. In the Pavilion, I poured myself a glass of wine, thinking how each one of my sisters had offered me space in her life; if I chose, I could literally spend the next year traversing the globe and inhabiting their various worlds.

But here I was, still living in my childhood home. And yet, I thought, there had been somewhere before this place. A life I didn’t remember and knew nothing about.

I walked determinedly to my office and switched on my laptop. Maybe now it was time to discover who I was. Where I came from. And where I belonged.

My hands trembled slightly as I accessed Google Earth. Carefully typing in the coordinates as Ally had instructed me, I held my breath, waiting for the laptop to tell me where to find my heritage. Finally, after the small circle on the screen had spun for an eternity – like a globe on its axis – the details appeared in front of me. And the place of my birth was revealed.

8

Surprisingly, that night I slept a deep, dreamless sleep, from which I awoke refreshed. I lay staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, processing what I’d learnt yesterday.

I felt the information I’d discovered had not been shocking – it was as if I’d always known it somewhere in my DNA. And in fact, purely coincidentally, my life had already encompassed a part of it. I could hardly believe that I had actually viewed the very house in which I might have been born. The aerial view on Google Earth made it seem enormous and very grand, and I wondered why, given its apparent splendour, I’d been removed from it by Pa Salt as a baby.

As I climbed out of bed, my mobile rang, and I grabbed it to try to answer before it rang off. I saw on the screen it was an unknown number and probably a cold call, so I left it and walked into the kitchen to revive myself with my usual morning mug of English Breakfast tea.

As I sipped it, I mused that it really was incredible to think that if I so wished, I could simply jump on a plane tomorrow and within twenty-four hours, I could be knocking on the door of my past.