.

Previously

…She took one trembling step forward. "My goodness. You've grown." I couldn't speak. Because the woman standing beneath the staircase was not a stranger. She was not another witness. She was the person whose disappearance had begun everything. My mother. And behind her, in the shadows of the entrance hall, stood a man holding the missing sheet music. A man whose face I recognised from the old photograph. Thomas Reed. He looked at Alexander. Then at me. And said: "Now that the wedding is over, we can finally tell you why your mother had to disappear." The piano stopped. The rain continued. And the house, for the first time in twenty-three years, was no longer silent.