“We only really acknowledge the beauty and brilliance of someone or something when they die,” she said, holding her pruning shears and deadheading some roses.

Snip.

She handed me a ball of dark crimson petals before moving on to some white lilies. “I’ve always found that strange, the way people don’t appreciate what they have until it is gone.”

Snip. Snip.

Then she bent down and cut a few dead daisies from the lawn. Seconds later, it was as though they were never there.

Snip. Snip. Snip.

The silver heart-shaped locket my father had given her one Christmas dangled from her neck. She’d worn it every day since, and I imagined pretty pictures of my sisters inside. My mother used to hold it between her thumb and her index finger when she was thinking. I wondered if she thought of them when she did.

I don’t remember why we were together at Seaglass without my sisters. Normally Nancy dropped me off alone when they were at school and she needed to disappear. She had joined an amateur dramatics group in London, and spent an increasing amount of time getting out of parental duties and getting into character for performances at the town hall. The local newspaper once described her as “a hard act to follow.” They did not mean it kindly. Nancy said we weren’t allowed to see her in a show until she was cast in a lead role, which meant we never saw her onstage.

I know Nana liked having the adult company when my mother came to stay at Seaglass. The two women had more in common than either of them realized or cared to admit. Acting and writing are surprisingly similar, and the wish to walk in someone else’s shoes—which is what actors and writers do—is a very human desire. But if they forget to take those shoes off, or forget who they really are, it can be a dangerous obsession.

Sometimes London was a little too loud for Nancy. Whenever she was having one of what she called her “blue days,” she needed to hibernate. Those days frequently coincided with her not getting a part she had auditioned for, or finding gray hairs, or not liking how she looked in a photo. But there were often times when I couldn’t tell what triggered my mother’s melancholy. When she was low, she preferred silence and solitude to hustle and bustle, and Seaglass became a place of sanctuary. Nancy would disappear into a world of her own when we were by the sea. When the tide rolled in, surrounding Seaglass with salty waves, it felt like a moat separating her from the rest of mankind and the people who had hurt her. Because someone hurt my mother; it’s the only explanation I can think of for why she was the way she was.

We dried and pressed the dead flowers between the pages of her Observer’s Book of Wild Flowers that afternoon, drinking homemade lemonade and enjoying the sunshine, and for a little while, I think we were almost happy. But it didn’t last.

“Are all the flowers in Nana’s garden wild?” I asked.

“All living things are wild,” Nancy answered.

“Even children?”

“Especially children.”

As she closed the book on the flattened daisies—the least interesting or beautiful of the flowers she picked—I felt as though she’d like to flatten me between the pages of a book too. It’s hard to explain, but it was the first time I truly understood that my mother didn’t really love me. The sea sounded louder, and I remember feeling filled with sorrow, as though the lonely thoughts inside my young head might drown me. I was nothing but a disappointment. A broken promise. She blamed herself for my broken heart, and when she looked at me, all she saw was guilt. In that moment, I understood that my mother loved my sisters, and she loved that garden, but her love for me was not evergreen, or even perennial; it would not grow back. Sad memories hide inside us all like ghosts.

It started the way it always did, a strange sensation in my chest. Then I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, even louder than the waves crashing on the rocks around Seaglass. Nancy sensed something was wrong when she looked at my face.

“Is it happening again?” she asked, without saying what.

I nodded. “I think so.”

She just stared at me.

“Is everything all right?” called Nana from the house.

There was only a brief hesitation, but it was there, before Nancy told her to call an ambulance. By the time she did, I was lying on the grass, my arms hugging my chest, my face pressed against the spot where the dead daisies used to be.

Nana and Nancy carried me across the causeway and up the cliff path wrapped in a blanket, to meet the paramedics on the road. The tide was already coming in, and I was running out of time. My heart stopped just before the ambulance arrived with a defibrillator. I always remember the dying part: the excruciating pain in my chest, the way it felt as though someone was squeezing the air out of my lungs, and the dizzy, light-headed moment just before blacking out. Then an infinite black.

My heart didn’t beat for three minutes, and I don’t remember anything about it. Nothing at all. Sometimes I feel jealous of other people’s near-death stories. For me, despite having died so often, there have never been any white lights, or long tunnels, or men with white beards waiting to welcome me at the pearly gates. My experiences were frightfully dull in comparison. I was there and then I wasn’t. But I do remember waking up on an unfamiliar ward; I was in hospital for four weeks the fourth time I died.

Because we were in Cornwall when it happened, there wasn’t time to get me to the children’s hospital in London where I’d been treated so many times before. At first, I was on a ward with all kinds of people—some very old, some very young—with all kinds of problems. The one thing that they had in common was that they all seemed more interested in my health than their own.

It has always fascinated me, how people seem to know so little about how their bodies work. But maybe that’s because their bodies do work, and it is human nature to take things that aren’t broken for granted. I lost count of all the people I had to explain my heart condition to during that stay. Over and over, I had to teach grown adults how their hearts worked and clarify why mine didn’t. People seem to know more about how their phones function than their own bodies. It’s bizarre and makes no sense to me.

The heart is a muscle, cleverly designed to pump blood all around the body and keep you alive. It’s simple and very complicated at the same time. The right side of your heart receives oxygen-poor blood from your veins and pumps it to your lungs, where it picks up oxygen and gets rid of carbon dioxide. The left side of your heart receives oxygen-rich blood from your lungs and pumps it through your arteries to the rest of your body. A septum separates the right and left sides, and the left side has thicker walls because it needs to put the blood under higher pressure. The heart is so strong that this whole process only takes about one minute, so if it stops for any reason, the person it belongs to stops pretty soon after. I find people glaze over when I start talking about atriums, or ventricles, or my problematic aorta, so it’s easier to just say I’ve got a faulty valve.

“My radiator had one of those,” a woman on the ward said. I didn’t know how to reply to that, so just nodded and smiled until she shuffled away in her back-to-front hospital gown.

My being in hospital was like a holiday for my mother. The dark circles beneath her eyes were several shades lighter than before. Every time I almost died, she looked rejuvenated. She was happier and healthier without me in her life, and a little secret part of me hated her for it. Nana was the only person who came to visit me regularly. She would read me stories, and make up new ones about all the hospital staff. Sometimes I’d wake up and she would be asleep in the chair next to me, holding a book in one hand and my hand in her other. I think that was the first time I knew that Nana loved me the most. More than she loved my sisters—unlike my mother. Though I didn’t understand why.

“Don’t you mind that I’m broken?” I asked one day when she came to visit.

She took off her pink-and-purple coat, sat down on the bed, and smiled. “You’re not broken in my eyes, and you shouldn’t see yourself that why either. We are who we think we are, and there is much beauty in imperfection.”

“But the doctors said that—”

“Pay no attention to the Doctors of Doom. They’ve been taught how to fix people, but not how to feel. You can do anything. You can be anyone. You just have to believe it.” She took the tray of uneaten hospital food that was next to the bed and tipped everything that had been on it into the bin. Then she put a red-and-white tablecloth over the sheets and put an elaborate-looking cake stand on top. It was covered with posh sandwiches and cakes … a takeaway afternoon tea from the Ritz. We started with scones, clotted cream on top of the jam, the Cornish way.

“The hospital food is terrible, no wonder you don’t eat it. I decided to smuggle something better in. I don’t want you starving, and I don’t care what the doctors think,” said Nana, taking a bite of her scone and getting jam on her nose. “You’re going to be just fine. People told me I’d never be a published author, but here I am. I believe that you can be whoever you want to be too. Forget what other people say about you, and write your own story.”

I’ve thought a lot about what Nana said that day. Her words played on a loop inside my head and had a profound effect on me. For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful about the future again. Her believing that I had one made me believe it too. I decided that she was right, and from that moment on, I was determined to prove those doctors wrong. I might have been young, but I could tell that my mother came to visit me in hospital out of a sense of duty and my nana came to visit out of love. Sometimes people confuse love and duty, but they are not the same. Neither were the women in my childhood.

“Thank you for coming to visit me, Nana,” I said. I felt overwhelmingly sad as I watched her put the pink-and-purple coat back on, preparing to leave the hospital.

“It was my pleasure, Daisy Chain. Just you remember to come and visit me at Seaglass when I am old and lonely.”

“I will.”

“Hope so. Just between us, you’re my favorite.”

I like to think she meant that. I wanted to be someone’s favorite something. Didn’t really mind what. When I think about Nana being gone from my life forever, I feel more broken than I ever have before. She was the only one who ever really believed in me, and I don’t know how to exist without her.

Secrets are like unpaid debts; they pile up, and too much interest is best avoided. I’m not as sweet and innocent as everyone thinks I am. Just because I don’t spend my life complaining like one sister, or thinking I’m better than everyone else like the other, it doesn’t mean I don’t have occasional dark thoughts. Nana’s book Daisy Darker’s Little Secret was a bestseller all over the world. I know some people thought the character was based on me, but the real Daisy Darker was never quite as sweet or broken as everyone wanted to believe. I have a secret of my own. And some secrets are worth killing to keep.