Silas was not listening anymore.

He had opened one of the envelopes with shaking fingers, and as he unfolded a piece of paper covered in a little girl’s handwriting, we heard, from the top of the stairs, the sound of a door opening.

Chapter 25 — Mr. Buttons

A small girl appeared on the landing above us.

She stood very still at the top of the stairs, one hand on the railing, and she looked down at Silas with enormous wide eyes, and nobody in the room breathed.

For what felt like an eternity the two of them simply stared at each other across six years and a flight of stairs, the fourteen-year-old boy who had let her go and the nine-year-old girl who had been too small, when it happened, to understand why her brother had disappeared.