The Girl Who Didn't Know What To Believe

The Day Her Life Changed started off seeming
quite ordinary to Meritxell. And if your ordinary
days are full of people you love, and opportunities
to please them, then that was not a bad
thing at all! It was a Sunday, and she and her Mother were
sitting at the kitchen table on a sunny day, peeling apples. It
was that time of year when there were lots of apples on the
ground and you have to pick them up swiftly or they’ll go
brown and mouldy and start to shrivel. So they sat with a
big bowl of juicy apples, and an enormous slightly battered
silver saucepan, and peeled and cored and sliced the fruit
and tossed it into the saucepan. Her Mother would then
make it into apple puree, which Meritxell loved to gobble
up with ice cream. Hume rather liked that too, because
somehow he always managed to eat some too.
Grandpa came into the kitchen with another bowlful of
apples, sat down, and took off the sun hat he liked to wear.
He leant down to ruffle the top of Hume’s head which he
always did with an affectionate ‘grrrrrr’. But this time, he
stopped at ‘grr..’, and when Meritxell and her Mother looked
up, they could see something was not right. His eyes were
wide open, and his face was pale, and he looked like someone
concentrating very hard on something. “Grandpa,
what’s wrong?”, blurted out Meritxell, and her Mother put
down her knife, jumped up and rushed round to him. Just
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