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The TV has been turned off and she hears whispering in the hallway, by the front door. Then footsteps coming into the kitchen.
    ‘I’m off.’ Nicholas raises his hand in goodbye and comes towards her. He’s going to kiss her, and she leans forward, standing up to meet him halfway. His lips brush past her ear. ‘Oh, I’ve read that.’ Her heart stops. Her throat closes. ‘I enjoyed it.’ Sweat pricks her top lip.
    Robert smiles: ‘Your mum’s struggling with it.’
    ‘Really? Not like you, Mum,’ and she feels the book leaving her hand and moving into her son’s. He misreads her face. ‘Yes, I did finish it. I do read, you know.’
    ‘No, no I didn’t … Is this your copy? Did you send it to me?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Maybe you left it here?’
    ‘No. I didn’t. Mine’s in the flat.’
    ‘How come you’ve read it?’
    ‘Catherine—’ Robert thinks she’s being unnecessarily provocative.
    ‘No, no, I only meant it’s a weird coincidence. It was sent to me when we moved and I’m not sure who—’
    ‘Well mine was a present.’
    ‘A present? Who from?’ She cracks. He looks at her, surprised, shrugging. ‘A grateful customer. Someone I helped, I think. I can’t remember – they left it at the till with my name on it. No big deal.’
    ‘Who was it?’ she asks again.
    ‘I don’t know, Mum. I told you. What’s the problem? Why does it matter?’
    She turns away, frightened of what he might read in her face, and mumbles her reply: ‘It doesn’t. No, it’s fine.’ She can’t let go though. ‘So, you liked it?’ she says.
    ‘Yeah, I did. Don’t want to spoil it for you though.’
    She waits. ‘It’s OK, I probably won’t finish it.’
    ‘Well, I’ll see you. I’ll call you during the week.’ He makes his way to the front door with Robert at his heels. She follows them.
    ‘So what happens?’ She is desperate. ‘I probably won’t finish it,’ she repeats. He opens the front door and turns round.
    ‘She dies. Sticky end. She deserves it though.’ And then he hugs his father and with a grin wiggles his fingers in farewell to his mother.

10
    Eighteen months earlier
    The words in Nancy’s manuscript did not break me. They made my heart race, they stirred me up, yet they did not break me. When I’d read ‘A Special Kind of Friend’, written by the young Nancy, I had heard her voice so clearly and it had made me weep. Now, with this later work, her last work, I heard her just as clearly, but as the mature woman I had been married to for over forty years. As the woman I had cared for when she was dying: washed, read to, fed, comforted as best I could. I had not expected to find this woman in print, yet there she was. I had given up on writing, but she had not. And, after spending time with her book, after reading it over and over, her words, which at first had unsettled me, gradually settled down within me, finding little nooks and crannies where they made themselves comfortable, until I trusted them, and they trusted me.
    I came to understand that Nancy wanted me to find her manuscript, just as she had wanted me to find the photographs. She had hidden them in places where she knew, eventually, I would come across them. She could have destroyed them, but she chose not to. She was waiting until I was ready – and I hadn’t been ready during her lifetime. I needed time with them on my own. Nancy’s manuscript churned me up, shook me about and sparked some life into me. It reminded me of something Nancy and I had always agreed on: fiction is the best way to clear one’s head.
    It had been such a long time since I had put words down on paper and this was the first time I had done it without Nancy being there – she had always been my motivation. Doubts I’d had in the past, questions I’d tormented myself with, vanished because I knew why this book had to be written and I was in no doubt who it was for.
    I turned my desk towards the window so I could look out on to the house