Holly grasped the handle of Cora’s back door and pushed down, but the door was locked.

As she ferreted in her handbag for the spare keys Cora had given her, she found herself hoping beyond reasonable hope that the older woman was out.

Although Cora had evidently become accustomed to spending long stretches in the house without seeing another soul, she’d also told Holly that every few days she forced herself to head into town. She’d stop at the coffee shop on the corner, she said, and then pick up a few bags of shopping before grabbing a cab home.

Holly supposed that today must be one of those days.

She twisted the key in the lock and stepped inside. As she’d hoped, the house was silent. She could even hear the loud tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway, Cora’s pride and joy that had been passed down by her mother’s side of the family.

She closed the door behind her and dumped her bag and keys on the kitchen counter. There, she found a note from Cora.

Popped to supermarket. Back soon x

She felt her shoulders relax a little, and the thumping headache that had developed on the bus journey back from town receded just a touch.

After surviving virtually a full day of Cora’s incessant reminiscing the day before, Holly had thought that she might actually scream if she had to accompany her on one more minute’s meandering down ruddy memory lane.

If she was a decent person, she probably wouldn’t entertain such unkind thoughts. But you couldn’t stop thoughts dead just because they were selfish, could you? If anything, if you didn’t acknowledge them, they’d probably grow stronger.

Holly was overjoyed that Cora had taken her in so readily, but that didn’t mean she had to sacrifice her sanity every single minute of the day from here on in. Or maybe it did. She wasn’t really in a position to be fussy right now.

She poured herself a small glass of orange juice and sat at the scuffed wooden table for a few minutes, allowing the silence around her to trickle soothingly into her bruised ears.

There had been so much noise in town today. Holly had done the rounds of three busy recruitment agencies with their mostly indifferent staff. Her suspicions had been correct. There really weren’t that many decent job vacancies around currently, certainly not for unskilled staff or with training provided.

Once she had explained in the first two appointments that she didn’t possess a university degree or hold a sheaf of impressive qualifications in her non-existent portfolio, she saw their already sparse enthusiasm fade away before her eyes.

It had taken all her resolve not to give up.

When she had entered the third and final agency, Office Cherubs, she was met at the door by a woman with dry brown hair, over-tanned skin and rabbit-like teeth.

‘I’m Karen, recruitment consultant,’ she said, extending a hand together with her self-important title. ‘You must be Holly?’

Holly smiled and nodded, relieved that she wasn’t going to be treated as a pariah this time. She felt hot after rushing across town to get to the building at exactly two p.m., her appointment time.

Karen led her to a quiet corner in the large open-plan office. Various people sat at desks dotted here and there, but nobody showed any interest in her.

Holly sat down and gratefully accepted the glass of water offered to her. She felt dead on her feet.

They had an informal chat and she was relieved that the woman seemed to accept her brief account of work experience without too many searching questions.

‘I think you’d be perfect for a vacancy we’ve just had in literally fifteen minutes ago,’ Karen said brightly. ‘Sales assistant for an upmarket shop in the centre of town. I could send you over for interview first thing tomorrow if you can email me your references before we close up today. How’s that sound?’

‘Sounds great,’ Holly nodded, trying to ignore the voice in her head that was starting to panic a little. ‘I can email them when I get home, if that’s OK?’

‘Perfect!’ Karen beamed, pushing over a pen and some papers. ‘Now, if you can just fill in this application form, I’ll print off the job description and person spec. They’re paying above minimum wage, so I expect this vacancy will prove popular when it goes online in the morning. Must be your lucky day, walking in just as we got it through!’

Holly had managed to complete the application form without too much bother and left soon after, assuring Karen she’d be emailing the references and ID documents.

‘I’ll call you later with the time of your interview and details of where to go,’ Karen had replied. ‘Here’s my card.’

On the bus home, Holly had fretted about whether her paperwork would stand up to scrutiny. The last thing she wanted was anyone raking up trouble for her.

If Geraldine found out where she was, she’d have to up sticks and leave again. Holly would face her when the time was right and not before, otherwise she would have no chance of triumphing.

On the spur of the moment, she’d got off the bus a few stops earlier and walked to the street where she’d lived with Aunt Susan.

She’d already decided she wouldn’t just brazenly walk up to the house and knock on the door. She didn’t want to risk finding Keith home alone or Aunt Susan telling her they’d washed their hands of her.

She’d never received reply to the note she’d sent to her aunt and she’d taken that to mean she wanted nothing more to do with her niece. But now she realised that the chances were, Patricia had never even posted it. The last thing they’d have wanted, with hindsight, was her to keep in touch with relatives who might realise what was happening and convince her to leave Medlock Hall.

No. It was best if she just kept watch, visited a few times. She might get lucky and bump into her aunt. It was bound to happen if she kept coming here.

She had turned the corner and froze.

The terraced houses had now completely gone and in their place stood a sprawling block of offices.

As she had stood there aghast, a woman emerged from the offices.

‘Excuse me!’ Holly had crossed the narrow road. ‘Can you tell me when these offices were built? I’ve just returned to the area and I remember there used to be houses here.’

‘That’s right, we’ve been here… let’s see… about seven years now. Our business was one of the first to move in here.’

Holly had thanked her and watched as the woman went on her way.

In that moment and despite her aunt’s faults, she had felt so completely and utterly alone.

---

Once she had finished her juice, Holly walked into the living room and looked around at Cora’s drab, dated furnishing.

It was a decent-sized room and it would be improved no end by getting rid of the heavy lace nets that swamped the window and swapping the gloomy fabrics for bright modern prints.

If Cora would give her a free hand to make improvements, Holly knew she could work wonders in here, but she didn’t intend to broach the subject.

Cora Barrett was a woman most definitely set in her ways, and she had very rigid ideas of how things should be. Holly felt sure that in Cora’s eyes, the room looked perfect.

She glanced up at the Artexed ceiling and the tarnished brass candle chandelier above her head. Living here was like being beamed back to the fifties.

However, the house itself was impressive and Baker Crescent was considered one of the better roads in the area. In the future, with younger owners, Holly had no doubt the accommodation would be transformed. One day, the dusty old museum she stood in now would be just a vague memory.

She sighed and took hold of her thoughts again. Old patterns of depressive thinking weren’t going to help her put the whole awful mess behind her, of that she felt certain.

She peeked through the window, but thankfully there was no sign of Cora returning from the shops yet.

Without even really considering what she should do next, Holly padded upstairs and stood outside the front bedroom, Cora’s room.

The plain, glossed white door was closed, so she gave it a firm push. As it began to open, it caught on the carpet underneath, so she kept pushing.

The room smelled a little fusty, as if it hadn’t actually been used for some time.

It was over-filled with heavy walnut furniture that crowded it out and gave the otherwise sizeable space a claustrophobic feel.

The dusty burgundy velvet curtains were half closed, and Holly snapped on the light to save her squinting unnecessarily into the gloom.

She walked over to the chest of drawers that stood by the window. The top was a sea of framed photographs, many of them featuring a gloriously young and vibrant Cora with various people, but mostly with Harold, whom Holly recognised from their wedding photograph on the mantelpiece downstairs.

She picked one of the photos up and studied it. Cora stood clutching the hand of a young girl with ribbons in her hair on Blackpool seafront. Cora was smiling but the child looked surly.

The photograph was black and white, but Holly could imagine the dull grey colour of the foaming sea behind them and the dirty beige sand on which a group of hapless donkeys stood, waiting forlornly for their next riders.

She replaced the photograph and didn’t bother inspecting the others. She felt fed up enough as it was without studying those long-ago scenes. It was nice to see Cora looking happy in most of them, but when Holly compared that glowing girl with the wrinkled woman she had become, she felt even worse about her own future.

How was it possible that years could flit by so quickly, robbing people of their happiest times?

She felt the keen passing of her own life, the division between the girl she had been before and the woman she had turned into.

Effectively she was betraying Cora’s trust by sneaking in here. That wasn’t the person she wanted to be.

She asked herself the question: would she want someone snooping through her room and rifling through her personal items? Most definitely not, came the uninvited reply.

Yet something in her demanded she take the opportunity to look around. That way, she had less chance of being fooled as she had been before. She might get a measure of who the real Cora was.

In the past, she had fallen far too easily into believing that people were who they said they were. It was a mistake that had cost her dearly; that might have already ruined her future and robbed her of the love of her life.

And she couldn’t quite believe that the old lady really had nobody in her life. No children of her own and therefore no grandchildren; not even any elderly friends to go and play bingo with, or whatever it was that old people liked to do these days.

It was quite sad, yet she couldn’t help thinking that Cora and Harold had obviously kept themselves purposely isolated all these years, and now Harold was long gone and Cora found herself alone.

Maybe she wasn’t quite the frail old lady she liked to pretend to be… People could surprise you.

Holly inched open the drawers one by one. After nearly asphyxiating herself with the smell of mothballs, she came across a large, tattered brown envelope in the last but one drawer from the bottom.

She slid it out and peeked inside. More photographs and a few papers. She was about to replace it when something caught her eye at the top of one of the letters.

Her heart lurched when she read the lines beneath.

It seemed that she’d been right. Cora had a secret of her own.