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Aurelle and Diana spent the last year of high school turning ever inward, plotting and planning their future together, their great escape to RBU in summer 1995. They lay on the bed in Aurelle’s room at the top of the house, the peaked roof making the ceiling slanted, and they thought of flying up and out. They loved their life with the Taylors, of course they did. Diana worshipped Marianne and considered herself a Taylor girl through and through. They were her family now.
Over the course of the past year, her own mother had disappeared from view. Mrs Martin slept all day. The cleaning lady worked around her. Opened curtains and windows to let fresh air in. Helen gratefully abandoned her daughter to the neighbours, so bottomless was her grief, so relieved was she that someone could di
