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Clara Gilligan was an accident. It’s a lovely thing to know about your existence — that it was lacking in intent from conception — but the whole ‘accident’ idea does serve to sum up the majority of her life since then too. Her father missed her birth because he was fucking his secretary, her mother rejected most attempts to initiate any kind of mother-daughter bonding, and that was Clara’s childhood in a nutshell. She was never wanting for anything except attention, affection, appreciation. The Gilligan family were well-off but in all other respects the environment was not somewhere for a child to thrive. She picked up a Harry Potter book when she was nine. Her nanny had been reading it, left it lying in the living room. Clara found it in her room one morning with a note affixed to the top - "Don't leave things in the living room - we might have adult guests!". Presuming that to mean that her mother did indeed have an adult guest, and presuming that to mean that she didn't want to leave the sanctuary of her own room, she settled back in bed and started reading. It was the second book in the series and (despite getting a little bit lost) Clara loved it. She asked her nanny if she could read the first book, and from then on she was |