December, 1981

A cold wind blew through the open door of the family house that morning, and as the young woman approached the front door clutching the bundle in her arms, the chill of the winter air seemed to paralyse her body. It was only when the door had been opened to her and she stumbled the last few steps into the hallway, that the woman allowed herself to be overcome by grief.

Her husband moved forwards embracing both her and the young baby that was wrapped in a blanket held protectively in her arms. Neither of them spoke. For those gathered, there was little else to do but watch, each one aware that nothing could be done to alleviate the pain. They were prisoners, trapped in a numbness that had fallen upon the house that day.

This was how she spent her first birthday, her senses completely blocked to the sadness that it heralded. It was the beginning of her life.

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Baby Killed in car crash.

The family of a birthday boy who was killed when their car overturned and ran off the road have paid tribute to him.

Mark Wood, age one, from York, died at the scene of the crash on the intersection between the A64 and A1237, near Rawcliffe on Monday night.

The mother, who was driving the Vauxhall Corsa and the boy's twin sister, escaped without serious injury. Mark's father Richard Wood, 37, described his son as "a beautiful little boy taken away prematurely."

Mr Wood, a local GP said "At the moment the family are still in shock. It has been a terrible loss and we are still trying to process what has happened. The event was made all the more tragic as this took place on his first birthday, on what was supposed to be a day of celebration."

A York Regional Police spokesman said: "Police are appealing for witnesses who may have seen the collision or the movement of the car prior to the collision to come forward."

The newspaper clipping lay flat on the desk. The young woman glanced at its content before turning her attention to the open window, squinting her eyes as the sun broke through the branches of the tree outside. Eve was the only person in the small, cramped bedroom that stood in the centre of a lonely district on the outskirts of London. She listened to the noises of people travelling to and from work below her, and shuddered as a breeze ran along her bare arms, causing the hairs to stand on end.

As she turned from the window she noticed the light dancing across the walls of her bedroom, made recently bare as she prepared to move out. For the first time since she had packed into boxes the memories of her childhood, she felt a strange pull of what it would mean to leave behind the world as she had known it for twenty years.

Edinburgh. That was to be her future, a place she had marked out as her own home. After two years of working in an office every day, only to return home to her mother every evening, leaving had begun to feel like a remote possibility. Her mother desperately wanted her to stay, - or rather, - needed her to stay. She understood that. She wanted life to be lived, as it had been ten years before, before it had all fallen apart for her. But for Eve, who had now entered her twenties, she was beyond caring. It was a childish view and she knew it, but it was no longer fair for her mother to deny her the direction she wanted her life to take.

Eve had tried to recall on numerous occasions what life had been like before the divorce. Before the resentment and criticism that would follow after the mention of her father's name. Her father was the academic, who still had a hold with the outside world. She remembered soaking up everything he told her with a mixture of awe and wonderment. Even as a teenager he had excited her imagination, encouraged her to be whatever she wanted to be. But theirs was a relationship that could not be shared with her mother. To someone like Kathryn Woods, any trace of Eve's father was best left in the past. He was fickle she had told Eve, and encouraged her not to rely on him, but to develop a strong sense of discipline and self " reliance, things that would really equip her for life. The refusals to acknowledge her father had inevitably led Eve to feel anger towards her mother. Her own wilder nature causing her to accuse her mother of being callous and uncaring. But in the end she endured her mother's discipline. She knew it was her way of coping after everything that had happened.

It was a shame that their relationship would suffer due to Eve taking her leave to University. She knew it was not what her mother wanted; but she realised this was always the design from the start. An inevitable result of what had lain ahead since her brother had died at- what her father had believed- was at the hands of her mother. Eve couldn't really blame her mother for finding it difficult to let her go, her reaction was the symptomatic result of what she had tried to prevent Eve's whole life. Unpleasant control over her daughter's life was in her mind a way to always be in it, and in turn to always have her daughter present in her own.

Mother and daughter had withstood each other well enough over the years, with Kathryn standing back allowing Eve to both make mistakes and succeed in her own achievements. Kathryn had been a helpless bystander, as Eve had fallen for Johnny, a relationship with a neighbour's son that had blossomed right under her nose. Eve was only fourteen at the time, and as with all teenage crushes she assumed it would burn out as quickly as it had ignited. This was a fact to Kathryn, and she was happy to let them be together. She had watched Johnny grow up, just as she had her daughter, but even she was surprised at the length of their relationship. Only after four years did it cease.

It was very sad when it did end, but Kathryn was secretly proud to see that Eve had inherited her reasoning and rationality. She recalled sitting on the bed with her daughter only two years ago, stroking her hair after she and Johnny had broken up and asking her daughter what had happened. She was surprised by the maturity of Eve's response. They were young when they began going out and they had grown up to become different people, who wanted different things. Although they both agreed that there would be no hard feelings on either side, Eve had mentioned wanting to defer her entry to University, since it would mean seeing Johnny every day.

Kathryn recalled how selfishly she encouraged her daughter to go through with this decision, suggesting that what lay ahead would still be there for her in the future, but that she should take some time to recover and earn some money in the meantime. She had seen the uncertainties of Eve considering her future and had used it as a way to keep her close. But as Kathryn told herself she was guarding Eve from the mistakes that she had made and couldn't bear to see her daughter make. Kathryn realised now that this decision had wedged a gap in the relationship between her and her daughter but was unable, like so many other things in her past, to change the events. And so it came to be that she, Kathryn Woods, had not only buried her son and alongside it her marriage, but had also prevented her daughter rising to the challenges that awaited her, just enough to enable the starts of withering the most precious relationship she had ever known.