Clio didn’t think she would ever get used to their new reality. Her lovely, affable, vivacious, larger-than-life father was gone. It had been over two months now, but she couldn’t seem to make the idea of his death stick in her brain. She kept forgetting that it had happened. When she read something that she thought might interest him or make him laugh, she still made a mental note to tell him when she saw him, only to remember moments later that she would never see him again. It was so painful, this process of constantly having to remind herself of the horrible truth.

Living at the Hall didn’t help, either. Maybe if she had a more normal existence away from the home that she’d grown up in, there might not have been so many reminders to ambush her. As it was, there wasn’t a corner of the house or gardens that didn’t have some memory of her father attached to it. Sometimes the recollections were so very strong that she almost felt them physically strike her, and she would have to stop what she was doing and wait until she had regained her equilibrium before she moved on.

And as if the unexpected death of her beloved father wasn’t enough for her to deal with, she also had to find a way through the rest of it. Slowly she had been joining the pieces of the puzzle together until she felt like she was starting to see the whole picture. The trouble was that the more she saw the worse it became, and it hadn’t taken her long to work out that she was going to have to keep it to herself. There was no way that she could ever let her mother find out, nor Hector for that matter.

Had it been simple coincidence or a cruel twist of fate that made Clio the reluctant custodian of her father’s secret? She wasn’t sure which. Hector had gone outside to get away from the cloying air of the hospital’s family room, and her mother was occupied filling in forms as the next of kin, leaving Clio the only one there when the nurse arrived with the pitiful plastic bag containing her father’s possessions.