September turned into October, and then Caroline received a telephone call from her grandmother. “I’m afraid I have sad news, darling. Aunt Lettie has had a stroke.”

“A bad one? Is she in hospital?” Caroline asked.

“No, she’s at home. The doctor came to the house.”

“She should be in hospital. If you catch a stroke early enough . . .” Anger exploded from Caroline.

“Sweetheart, she didn’t want extraordinary measures. She must have foreseen this, because she said to me, only a couple of days ago, ‘If anything happens to me, no hospitals, no tubes. I’ve lived long enough. I don’t need to be kept alive like a vegetable.’”

“So it’s bad?” Caroline asked.

“The doctor says she doesn’t have long, and she seems quite comfortable,” Granny said. “She was quite lucid when it happened. She asked for you. Several times.”

“I’ll come right down,” Caroline said.

She put down the phone and found that she was crying. Everything else that had happened—Josh leaving, Teddy going, the Twin Towers falling—had made her angry but not made her cry. This last straw brought her to her knees. She sat on her bed and wept. Aunt Lettie was over ninety, she knew. She should be glad her great-aunt was dying naturally and in her own bed. But when Caroline was growing up, it was Great-Aunt Lettie who listened when she complained of her absent mother, bullying girls at school or unfair teachers, and gave calm, measured advice and reassurance. “People only bully because they feel inadequate, Caroline. You should pity them. And that teacher—how old is she? An old spinster like me. Probably she resents seeing you bright young people with your lives full of hope.”

“Why are you always so nice?” Caroline remembered asking her. “So kind. So forgiving?”

“I wasn’t always,” her great-aunt replied. “Experience makes one come to terms with life, to be at one with the mind and the heart. And most people are suffering in some way.”

“Oh, Aunt Lettie,” Caroline whispered. “What will I do without you?”

On the train down from London, it came to her that her grandmother would be hurting, too. The two old women had lived together for years. Granny would now be all alone, too, if Caroline didn’t move in with her. Caroline had asked for a few days’ compassionate leave. She’d take it from there.

The weather matched her mood as she changed from a train to a bus in the town of Godalming, and then walked to her grandmother’s house in the village of Witley. The sky was leaden with the promise of rain. A cold wind swirled up piles of leaves, and the first drops spattered on to her. Her grandmother lived in a pleasant but unpretentious bungalow at the edge of the village. It had a large garden dotted with fruit trees and a view of the twelfth-century grey stone church. Granny was passionate about her garden. Even though she was now in her eighties, she could often be found kneeling at a flower bed, weeding or deadheading. Of course, these days she had a man who came in once a week to mow, prune and dig, but she supervised him like a hawk.