‘Kelly?’ Pete called, doubtful, and Kelly somehow stopped gazing at Mathieu, gulped a couple of times and found the strength to answer.

‘Lock up, Pete,’ she called unsteadily. ‘I’ll let them out through the cottage.’

‘You sure?’ Pete sounded worried. The head of security was a burly sixty-year-old who lived and breathed this park. He also treated the park employees as family. Any minute now he’d demand to see Rafael’s credentials and give Kelly a lecture on admitting strange men into her home.

‘It’s okay,’ Kelly called, straightening and forcing her voice to sound a lot more sure than she felt. ‘I know…I know these people.’ Her voice fell away to a whisper. ‘I know this child.’

The park-a restoration and re-enactment of life on the goldfields in the eighteen-fifties-had mine-shafts, camps, shops, hotels and also tiny homes. As much as possible it was a viable, self-supporting community and the homes were lived in.

Kelly’s cottage was halfway up the hill. There were ten of these cottages in the park, and Kelly felt herself lucky to have one. It might not have mod cons but it had everything she needed and she could stay steeped in history and hardly ever step out into the real world.

Which was the way she liked it. She didn’t think much of the outside world. Once, a lifetime ago, she’d ventured a long way out and been so badly hurt she might never venture out again.

Now she stepped through the front door of her cottage feeling as if her world were tipping. The warmth of her wood-stove reached out to greet her, and it was all she could do not to turn round and slam the door behind her before these strangers followed her in.

For the more she thought about it, the more she thought this must be some cruel joke. Fate would never do this to her. Life had robbed her of Mathieu. To hand him back…It was an unbelievable dream that must have no foundation in reality.