The sun came out behind me and my shadow was cast so long it nearly touched the foot of the bluestone house, and then it disappeared again and the wind turned even colder. I shivered and drew Nassim’s hoodie closer around me.

‘Anna? Is it really?’ came a man’s voice from behind me, thick with a Dutch accent. ‘Is it little Anna?’

I turned to see a short silver-haired man standing at the back door of the small house wearing a dressing gown embroidered enough to be a king’s robe, at odds with the tattered grey slippers on his bony feet. This must be my grandfather, Hessel. I saw Bette hovering behind him, beaming at the scene, like she had invented me herself, drawn me out of the air – her miracle!

Hessel stepped down from the doorway and came towards me, his arms outstretched.

‘Oh, our girl, look at you – you are from the old country, you certainly are!’ He embraced me and I smelled the old-world European perfume of his hair-crème, and it reminded me instantly of Opa. Hessel looked at me again and kissed me once on one cheek, and then on the other, and then again on the first.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘My dear! It is my absolute pleasure to meet you.’

‘And it is a pleasure to meet you, too,’ I said.

‘Such manners too.’ He smiled at me and then at Bette. And then he announced to the world at large, ‘My granddaughter. Of course she is a beauty! Ah, but it is easy to be beautiful when you are young. But look to my Elizabeth.’ He pronounced my grandmother’s name with a hard ‘t’ at the end; neither ‘Bette’ or ‘Elizabeth’ but a Hessel-specific combination of the two, and we both turned back to look at her where she stood, still hovering outside the back door, watching on like a proud gift-giver. ‘You are hoping you will have her genes, huh?’

I smiled. His obvious affection for his elderly wife was adorable. Then he caught me looking at the old house, the grand old bluestone ruin. ‘And what do you think of your inheritance, eh?’ he asked. ‘Elizabeth’s family home. Your family home. She is grand, isn’t she? We are restoring her, do you know? She is going to be grand again.’

‘It’s . . . it’s amazing,’ I said, and I smiled, but I must have looked confused too, or bewildered, because then he said, ‘It is true that it is perhaps taking a bit longer than I thought – age has its effects. Oh I am young at heart, yes, but perhaps just a little bit older in some of the other places, eyes and legs and hands and so on. But we will get there. This,’ he said, gesturing dismissively behind him to the smaller fibro house. ‘This is just temporary. Just a stopgap.’

I looked at him a bit sideways then. A bit dubious even. He caught the look. ‘Ah, don’t you give me the side-eye, young lady. Just know that I would be unstoppable,’ and he made a show of bending forward in an old-man pose and holding his back and saying in a creaky voice, ‘if only I could get started.’