Merrin woke with something that felt a lot like relief at the fact that she was in the place she loved where the sounds and smells were familiar and comforting. Running her hand over the wall she had faced on more nights than she cared to count, she pictured the little girl she had been, casting wishes that she hoped would scamper up the wallpaper and leap out of the open window, shooting up into the night sky. As a big girl, too, all the things she had hoped for her and Digby had been pictured clearly with her eyes screwed shut and a smile on her face while her sister snored in the bed opposite. The thought of Digby stirred the sediment of anxiety at what the day might hold; the thought of what lay ahead: seeing people for the first time, attending a wedding! I need to get through this, I need not to crumple and I want to be invisible . . . One more wish that she hoped would come true.

She looked across the room at the beautiful shape of Miguel, asleep under the quilt in the space that used to be occupied by her big sister. It felt strange to have Ruby living next door, where their gran had lived all her life. And the pang in her chest was one of longing: how she would like, just for a while, to go back to when the Kellow girls had lived a simple life with their gran and gramps next door and the whole family meeting for endless cups of tea and supper wherever it was being dished up. This in the time when everything was funny and she, Bella and Ruby would regularly collapse in tears of laughter over the smallest thing or innuendo. A time before she had even been aware of Digby.

Closing her eyes briefly, she tried to imagine coming home for good. What would that life look like? The way it had felt to see Loretta had floored her, briefly, but she had survived her once and she could survive her again. Mrs Everit’s unwavering support meant more than she could possibly say. It spoke of community and was the very thing Merrin loved most about living in Port Charles. Did it matter that at some level she felt like an outsider, aware of how things had trundled on without her, and that her being here felt like something special, unusual, a novelty, as if she had lost her place as a local and lost her confidence in her ability to fit in?