Norah couldn't bring herself to speak. She shook her head as Mrs Morris ventured further into the room. ‘Oh, you poor, dear girl,’ the well-meaning woman prattled on. ‘Of course, you’re not alright. Hark at me, making things worse. I just wanted you to know that if you need anything, anything at all, you can find me in the kitchen … or would you like me to sit with you while your father is … well, you know …’
Again, Norah shook her head, not trusting herself to speak, willing Mrs Morris to leave her alone.
With a sigh and a comforting pat on Norah’s shoulder, the cook bustled out of the room and at last the tears started to flow. Her poor, dear, gentle mother was dead – there was nothing anyone could do to make things better. The three of them had been such a close, tight-knit family. It had always felt to Norah that their love for one another was like a cocoon, protecting them from the outside world. Now that cocoon had been ripped apart and nothing would ever be the same again. In her head, she could hear herself screaming, ‘NO, IT’S NOT TRUE, NO’ over and over again but she made no sound. Her silent grief felt so painful she thought her chest would explode and she wondered if this was what a broken heart was like.
Arthur’s words earlier, like a portent of doom, came back to her as she slumped, clutching a cushion, on the sofa. He was right. Good things do not last forever.
◆◆◆
Chapter 3
Emily – November 2016
The accident which had claimed the lives of both her parents had happened ten years earlier but Emily had relived that moment of revelation so often in her nightmares that the sharpness of it remained unblunted. The immediate aftermath was less clear, more of a fog of misery but those feelings of isolation had remained with her. Only the presence of Molly had kept her from feeling completely abandoned. However, there had been more shocks to come. She let her mind drift back…
Six weeks after the tragedy, Emily was still struggling to come to terms with the loss of her parents. It felt like she was living in a vacuum and she seemed to have become incapable of making any decisions about her future. She assumed that at some point she would return to university but her desire to do so seemed to have disappeared and for the moment she could only drift aimlessly through each day. Since the accident, she had been staying at her childhood home with her aunts, Jen and Liz, her dad’s unmarried sisters and the only family she now had. The two sisters lived together in a modest house in nearby Sudbury and, throughout Emily’s childhood, had always been a fixture at family celebrations. She loved them dearly and was very grateful for their company during these early, grief-filled days.
Jen was the elder of the two, large and buxom with frizzy, grey hair and a bustling, organising way about her. She had been a teacher and was used to being in charge while Liz, a retired office manager, thinner, quieter but physically very similar to her sister, was used to taking care of the details. Together they submerged their own sadness at the loss of their much-loved younger brother and sister-in-law; instead, they busied themselves looking after Emily and protecting her from having to deal with all the things officialdom demanded. They dealt with the police, organised the death certificates and supported her when she met with the funeral directors. Meanwhile Emily was oblivious to it all, lost in a sea of grief and steered through the melee in the lifeboat they provided.
Her friends also rallied around her as friends do in situations like those. Ellie and Jo, her two best friends from university, had travelled up together and booked accommodation at a nearby B & B and many of her friends from school days had returned for the funeral. They had all done their best to support her and to make her feel loved and she had appreciated that, but they were not the two people who had loved her most and who had made her feel cherished her whole life. Eventually they had returned to their own lives with promises to keep in touch and left her to her aunts’ care. Connor had phoned once but their relationship was too new and still too tentative for him to know what to say. He had tried - he sent lots of texts the first few days- but gradually these had dried up and Emily felt relieved. She really could not deal with a boyfriend at a time like this.
Aunt Jen and Aunt Liz were great but Emily found herself spending more and more time in her room with Molly, looking through the photo albums her parents had kept and trawling through images she had stored on their old laptop computer. She especially loved those early photographs before she was born. Her parents had really enjoyed travelling and each destination had its own set of photographs, all painstakingly captioned and dated. Her favourite was dated June 1984 and taken by a stranger. It depicted her parents laughing by the Trevi fountain in Rome. She remembered them telling her how they had each thrown a coin into the fountain and made a wish, promising only to tell each other what they had wished for if it came true. When she was born three years later, her dad had taken her into his arms and smiled at his wife.
‘Remember the Trevi fountain in Rome?’ he had asked. ‘This is what I wished for.’
‘Me too,’ she had replied.
Emily had never tired of that story and tears filled her eyes as she looked at their faces in the photograph. They
