The Rose Garden

He’d been brusque and short-tempered, as Daniel had warned me he might be, and if I hadn’t known it was his way of showing worry I’d have taken it to heart. As it was, I found it touching, even flattering, that this fierce man had taken on the role of my protector so completely.

I did not belong here. This was not my room and not my bed. And yet, a part of it felt right to me, and somewhere deep inside my mind a tiny voice kept speaking up to say that Daniel Butler had been wrong to tell me I was far from home.

‘You’re not real,’ I reminded him. ‘You can be born where you like.’ ‘Thank you.’ Now he looked amused.

‘I would argue ’tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories. That is why we find that having lived them once, we never can recapture them.’

‘The thing is,’ said Felicity, ‘your family doesn’t seem to have thrown anything away. What is this, your first shoe?’

Daniel smiled and let his hand drop. ‘Damn the man,’ he said, without an ounce of violence. ‘Even now he is developing the instincts of a brother.’

‘What’s your excuse?’ I asked. ‘You live down here.’ ‘True.’ The charm was deliberate. ‘But I have a feeling I’m going to be climbing The Hill fairly often myself, in the very near future.’

Though it seemed incredible, I had gone back in time. And that wasn’t something a doctor could cure.

Time was good at erasing the tangible proof that a person had lived.