Eurydice Grey was born in 1947 in a small-town orphanage in Arizona. She was a coldly curious child, always perched on the kitchen counter with her blonde hair in pigtails and a book in her lap. The staff were somewhat intimidated by her cool, clear voice and her lack of real emotion. Her face would form the required expression, and her posture would reflect it, and her voice would back them up, but her heart was not in it and her eyes were cold as ice.
Everybody breathed out when she went off to a boarding school in the Appalachian Mountains. She came back that summer paler than ever before, but within seconds it was as if she had never left.
The next summer, she did not return until the last week of August. She had been staying with a friend, she told them, and since the friend had provided her with feminine hygiene products (all the staff had been dreading those birds and bees) nobody complained.
The summer after that, she brought a friend with her. He was thirteen years old, impeccably behaved and so different to Eurydice that it was (or so people said) a miracle that they were friends. He helped out at the orphanage, doing whatever needed doing and endearing himself to the staff with his every move; she wandered around the town in a sort of trance, snapping at anyone who talked to her.
One afternoon, they shocked everyone by going into a tearoom on the high street and proceeding to have a rather violent argument in low whispers. The waitress reported that the argument involved whether to order tea or coffee, and was not resolved until Eurydice's gentleman friend (everyone called him that, except Eurydice herself, who called him Spike) placed his hand on Eurydice's stomach and raised his eyebrows.
Naturally, rumours started flying around. Eurydice and her gentleman friend disappeared suddenly halfway through June and did not return until the last week of August. Eurydice's hair was no longer in pigtails.
Somebody said they had seen a pregnant girl, looking like Eurydice but calling herself Donna Bell, being admitted into a hospital a few miles down the freeway. Somebody else said they had seen Eurydice's gentleman friend leaving the hospital with a baby in his arms. Somebody else said that Donna Bell had given birth to that baby, which she had supposedly named Lily.
All anyone knew about the matter was that Eurydice never told anyone where she had been, and no baby ever materialised. The matter never removed itself from people's minds, though.
Nobody was quite sure how to feel when Eurydice, aged seventeen, packed up and announced she was going to Britain. Nobody tried to stop her. The only person who cared was her gentleman friend, and he was following her.
They were never married.