Her name had been Rose Mercer, née Calloway, and she had died of a cardiac event in February when I was twelve years old.
That was the version I had carried. The death certificate version, the one my father had given me, sitting on the edge of my bed with his hands between his knees and his voice doing the thing voices do when they are reporting something they can’t fully believe yet.
A cardiac event. She was thirty eight. These things happen, the doctor had said, in the language doctors use when they need to give terrible things a container.
Diana told me the truth three days later, not in Mayfair this time but on a video call from her London flat, her face in the screen serious and careful and carrying the weight of something she had been deciding whether to say for twelve years.
Ros
