As Marie prepared to break into her father’s bedroom, she felt a little pool of guilt well up inside her for betraying him. Her patriarch was a respected man in town who kept to himself, who attended church eight times a week (every morning and twice on Sundays). He possessed no interests besides the rapture of the holy sacrament, and studying the mating habits of bacteria. He did not deserve such disrespect from his only daughter. But, unfortunately, the burning desire to find something – anything – about her mother had reached an irrepressible level for Marie, and that Wednesday afternoon, when the rain made lovely fat spatters on the cobblestones outside, was as good a time as any to betray him.

People only see what they want to see. That’s what Marie’s father always told her. He rarely gave out fatherly advice; this was his one dabble in cliché. If you only acknowledged the narrowest purpose for a person or object, the world was a far smaller and less interesting place.

She wasn’t exactly sure what her father meant or why he liked to say it, but she would make use of this phrase now to break into his bedroom. She retrieved a hairpin from her blonde hair. She had no experience as a cat burglar, but Olaf, a local delinquent who caught the same tram as Marie on the days he chose to attend school, had bragged to her earlier that week that one could unpick a lock with a piece of thin metal. ‘Stick it in and jiggle,’ he’d boasted as he coughed on a cigarillo. Marie held up her strip of brass and smiled. Most people who owned a hair pin saw only an object for holding back their tresses. Now Marie saw different. She saw a key…

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