The hinge was caked in rust and wouldn’t open far, but I pressed my nose and mouth to the gap and sucked in the cool air. I felt ill. I could hear the sea at the foot of the cliffs, as well as the tap of mallets and the ring of men’s voices. Imagine if Cory came up here and found me standing among his secrets. What would he say? What would I say? I swung round to face the door, and my elbow caught the china wash jug, sending it flying off the sill.

“Shit!”

The jug broke into large shards, and a scrap of paper fell out. I stared at it for a second before stooping to pick it up.

It was yet another of Cory’s paintings: a pair of watercoloured hands folded loosely inside one another. I glanced across at mosaic-Stella, with the missing section on her lap, and I didn’t need to cross the room to double-check. It was obvious from here that my find was a perfect fit.

I studied the hands more closely. Cory was a pretty good observer of superficial detail—I’d always given him that. He had captured the willowy outline of Stella’s fingers, and the square shape of her nails, with ease. It was her self he failed to touch on. Even in his depiction of a pair of folded hands he managed to leave out what mattered: the high tension that had strung my sister together; her nail-bitten impatience; the way her fingers used to dance. Cory had drawn passive hands, and however well he thought he knew her, he was wrong to do that.

I turned it over.

Stella Maria Lyell, she’d written on the back. Stella Maria Lyell, Stella Maria Lyell, Stella Maria Lyell . . . like a poem down the centre of the sheet.

The sight of my sister’s handwriting made my throat feel fat and full. She’d written hastily in Biro, the letters more gaunt and flyaway than usual, but still familiar to me. I traced the loops of her signatures with the tip of my little finger and read each one in turn, word by word, line by line.

When I eventually looked up it was the lurid oil painting that caught my eye, and the grubby footprint I’d made. In sympathy, or out of habit, I touched my own throbbing neck.

I folded the torn paper and put it in my pocket. In all this dross—this horror—I glimpsed a tiny grain of gold.

Stella hadn’t killed herself after all; therefore, I hadn’t killed her, either.

Cory wouldn’t hurt a fly—or so his mother used to think. She would have vouched for it with her life, once upon a time, when he was still her golden boy. Before he grew up and went away. Before Stella.

Diana visualises her life in terms of four eras.

1. Before Mr. Byrne

2. After Mr. Byrne