She tried again, keeping her eyes closed. She was agitated, she already knew that. It was why she was doing this. It always worked.

Only this time it didn’t.

After the third attempt, fed up with her glowing white knees and resolutely black heart, she opened her eyes again and rolled up, just as agitated as before. Perhaps she should have waited till the end of the session – get her flows in first. Find a rhythm and soothe herself that way.

Jumping up, she stood in the mountain pose, feet in parallel, eyes dead ahead, her hands splayed with the fingers pointing to the floor. As she began to run through the sequence, letting her body move rather than forcing it into stillness, she felt her mind begin to drift. Yes. She closed her eyes, running through the asana twice, three times, just feeling the rhythm and controlling her breath – it was the only thing she could control seemingly . . .

By the time she opened her eyes, her mind was drifting like a boat on water. There was no wedding, no Stephen, no Nathan, no bouncing baby . . . But there was, in a sort of slow-motion comedy sketch, one of the golf carts trundling slowly over the lawn, Señora Quincy sitting in the front, a straw hat on.

Charlotte’s gaze snapped back into focus. She was supposed to be resting from the journey. Was she getting some air? Reac-quainting herself with the estate? Charlotte wondered how much it had changed in her absence – these wings certainly hadn’t been here back then (whenever ‘then’ was) – but the old woman didn’t seem overly curious, her gaze fixed forwards rather than scanning the landscape. Perhaps she didn’t want to see the changes, perhaps they challenged her too much, serving as painful indicators of all that she had missed out on?

The buggy came to a stop at one of the decorative flowerbeds that broke up the lawn: a low stone retaining wall encircled a mature jacaranda tree, with profuse oleander bushes clustered at its base. She watched as the driver – one of the male orderlies she had seen helping her with the step earlier – got out, listening to something his passenger was saying. He pointed at the bed and Señora Quincy nodded. The man hesitated, looking uncertain. Then he stepped over the wall and into the bed, up to the jacaranda tree. He looked back at the old woman and yet again she said something that made him point and then move. Charlotte frowned as she watched him carefully encircle the tree, before stopping at a point on the far side from where Charlotte sat, and stooping out of sight. What on earth was he doing?

A moment later, he straightened up and, picking his way carefully back over the bed, handed something to Señora Quincy. Charlotte could see her nod her thanks from the tilt of her hat but she was too far away to see what the item was that she placed in her lap. All she could see, as the driver got back in and turned the buggy towards the hacienda again, was that Señora Quincy had taken the item and was pressing it to her lips as though it was treasure.