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I gasped as the pain rippled through my chest.

My mother had a complicated family setup.

Mum… Mummy.

I drifted as the tablets worked their magic.

Chapter II Smell

Doctor Dylan parked his BMW in the driveway, took a deep breath, and gave me his usual wary look. “Here we are,” he said. He lived in an elegant, super-large, old house in Chiswick, West London. It looked recently renovated, painted in off-white, and a world away from the rural, cramped, chaotic but cozy home I had shared with my family in our village of Bekesbourne in Kent. It seemed far too big for one person.

“The whole house?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yep. All mine.”

“Wow.” Attempting a smile, I found it easier than I remembered. All I had to do was concentrate on pushing the sides of my mouth upward and the corners of my lips lifted for a moment. Seemingly satisfied with my feeble attempt, Dylan climbed out of the car.

I let out a sigh of relief. He’d been hovering around me like a mother hen on steroids since I broke down at the funeral. But that was over a week ago and I hadn’t had a relapse. My BFF Numb had returned, bringing her indifference and reducing my grief to a low hiss of white noise—a rumbling, monotonous buzz in the background that drowned out the world but made it hard to concentrate on anything. She kept me safe. She kept all feeling at a distance, though focusing on anything required a huge mental effort. But I managed, and even though I felt fragile and brittle, I held it together for Dylan’s sake. I wanted to spare him my suffering. He didn’t volunteer to take on an adolescent girl lost in grief; he was drafted.

Don’t go there, Emily.

Following Doctor Dyl’s lead, I climbed out of the car. He’d opened the boot and retrieved my two battered suitcases and his holdall. He unlocked the stained-glass front door and pushed it open. I caught a glimpse of a wide hallway and lots of polished wood before a loud, incessant beeping from an alarm stopped me on the threshold. It was unbearable, penetrating my skull and disrupting the white noise.

The noise! No!

I started to hyperventilate as Dylan stepped inside, and I screwed my eyes closed.

Stop the noise! Please! Stop!

The words echoed through my head. I heard the electronic beep of numbers and the hellish racket ceased. When I opened my eyes, Dylan was standing beside a small electronic panel on the wall at the bottom of an ornate, oak staircase.

“Too loud?” he asked.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

I frowned. The alarm sound wasn’t his fault.

I stepped inside and took a steadying breath as I tried to absorb the surroundings. The wide reception hall was spacious and minimalist—the ceilings high, the walls blindingly white, the wooden floors gleaming. It was all very tasteful but with a ringing emptiness that was the complete opposite of the clutter and mismatched color that was my parents’ home—my happy, comfortable home. It had been full of music, full of my brother’s noisy play, and, above all, full of laughter—from my parents’ wicked sense of humor and from Billy.

My home. Lost forever.

It dawned on me that it wasn’t bricks and mortar that made a home, but people—the people who love you. Numb stepped aside, and my hollowed-out insides rippled with anguish, my grief close to the surface.

No! I must hold it together for Doctor Dyl’s sake.

He placed my suitcases at the bottom of the stairs, then ran a hand through his hair, and I imagined he was searching for something to say. I felt small standing near him, this man I hardly knew. As my mother’s mysterious, never-seen stepbrother, he’d been on the periphery of my childhood. When I was younger, he’d been at boarding school, and then he was accepted early into Oxford to study medicine, so we’d only seen him for the occasional family event and the odd Christmas. My mother hadn’t grown up with him, and they’d only really reconnected once Billy was born.

Dylan’s eyes, the color of a winter sky, were cool and apprehensive as he regarded me, his lips pressed in a hard line. In his white T-shirt and jeans, he looked too young to be a doctor, and far too young to be saddled with me. He ran his hands through his fair hair again, leaving it spiky. Over the past few weeks, I’d gathered that Doctor Dyl did this when he was either deep in thought or exasperated.

He threw his car keys into a bowl on a console table that was the lone piece of furniture in the wide hallway, then gazed at me as if he expected me to say something.

“It’s nice. Clean.” My words sounded empty, but it was all I could think of to say.

His lip twitched almost into a smile, but not quite. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s come a long way since it was a squat.”

“Squat?”