The Marble Collector: The life-affirming, gripping and emotional bestseller about a father’s secrets

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‘Part of his marble collection.’

‘He’s lost his marbles?’ She laughs. I don’t. She finally catches her breath. ‘Well, I don’t think your dad ever had anything to do with marbles, dear. Perhaps it’s a mistake, perhaps they’re not your father’s, or Mickey delivered the wrong boxes. Do you want me to call him?’

‘No,’ I say, confused. I look on the floor and see pages and pages covered in Dad’s handwriting, cataloguing these marbles, and yet Mum seems to genuinely know nothing.

‘The marbles are definitely his and the missing items were valuable.’

‘By his own estimation, I’m guessing.’

‘I don’t know who valued them, but there are certificates to show they’re authentic. The certs for the missing marbles aren’t here. The inventory says one item was worth up to twelve thousand dollars.’

‘What?’ she gasps. ‘Twelve thousand for marbles!’

‘One box of marbles.’ I smile.

‘Well, no wonder he almost went bankrupt. They weren’t mentioned as assets in the divorce.’

‘He mightn’t have had them then,’ I say quietly.

Mum talks like I haven’t spoken at all, the conspiracy theories building in her head, but there’s one question she’s failed to ask. I didn’t pack them and she didn’t know about them, but somehow they found their way to the rest of Dad’s belongings.

I take Mickey’s office details from her and end the call.

The marble collection covers the entire floor. They are beautiful, twinkling from the carpet like a midnight sky.

The house is quiet but my head is now buzzing. I pick up the first batch of marbles on the list. The box of bloodies that I showed to Dad, listed as ‘Allies’.

I start to polish them. Kind of like an apology for not ever knowing about them before.

I have a knack for remembering things that people forget and I now know something important about Dad that he kept to himself, which he has forgotten. Things we want to forget, things we can’t forget, things we forgot we’d forgotten until we remember them. There is a new category. We all have things we never want to forget. We all need a person to remember them just in case.