It was so easy to be fooled into seeing them. A long time ago, her father had taught her some of the constellations in the night sky, and then told her the truth about them: that in reality the stars people grouped together were light years apart and had no actual relationship to each other. But our ancestors found patterns in the sky and named them after gods and animals and heroes. They named them after stories, or else made-up stories about them. And yet, even now, when we look up we see constellations, and believe they’re real, because that’s what we’ve been taught to see. She’d made a mistake with her father’s map. From what was found at the viaduct, she’d imagined it showed the location of bodies, but all she’d been doing was forming her own pattern from those crosses. In reality, it marked the distressing, final path a little girl – Anna Price – had taken one afternoon a long time ago. It was a record of her father’s grief and anger and self-recrimination. Hannah stood in his kitchen again now, slowly turning the pages of her treasured photograph album.
