This One Is for You

Grief counsellor Marion King has spent three years at a quiet Somerset hospice, tending the dying because it keeps her from tending her own loss. Then Edna Rackham arrives: seventy-two, dying of cancer, inseparable from an old Singer sewing machine and a canvas roll of embroidered panels so lifelike they seem to breathe. Edna wants to confess. She will only do it through her needlework. And stitched invisibly into the first panel, in thread the colour of dried blood, are two words repeated a thousand times.