Since securing the top prize in a widely-publicised UK writing contest, ANOUSKA KNIGHT has become an international sensation with her debut novel, SINCE YOU’VE BEEN GONE, hitting both The Bookseller and Heatseekers bestseller lists and securing praise from the likes of Jackie Collins and Jenny Colgan. A former bakery owner, she has gone on to wide acclaim in her native England and now writes full-time. Anouska lives in Staffordshire close to the countryside where she grew up, with husband Jamie, her childhood sweetheart, their two growing boys and new baby son. When she’s not writing or wrestling small children, she’s still often found baking and will whip up a cake at the drop of a hat if asked nicely.

For Jim, who I love.

Always the same. Never changes.

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

12th September 2004

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

2nd November 2006

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

2nd November 2006

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

12th September 2004

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

Autumn Term, 2007, Eilidh High School

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

Endpage

Copyright

12th September 2004

Alex burst from the break in the trees frantically enough that, had she left the woodland a little way further up the roadside, she might have missed him altogether. Any other time it would’ve been odd, him just sitting there in his cab, pulled over awkwardly on the track running up towards the house. But not today. It was as if he were waiting for her, his unmistakable battered blue tow truck a beacon of hope where it sat in the dusty layby. Her burning lungs had gasped at this meagre stroke of luck, if luck had any part to play here. His being there had saved vital minutes. Precious time reclaimed by not having to make it all the way back up the lane to the house.

Ted Foster’s hands were already braced on the steering wheel, as if by some sixth sense he knew what was coming to find him moments before his daughter slammed herself, wild and startled, against his truck bonnet. Alexandra had looked crazed, unrecognisable when she’d sprung in front of his windscreen, the vein in her neck jumping with the emergency pulsing through her lean frame. Her eyes had been too white, as white as Ted’s knuckles had been while he’d sat there, solemnly regarding the truths he couldn’t take home.

Ted had made the call as they’d started through the small copse of trees and across the farmland beyond, calmly relaying to the operator the information Alexandra had managed to unscramble as her voice had cracked and her legs momentarily buckled.

Help is coming! The thought screamed through Alex’s head. Dad’s coming, Dill, Dad’s coming.

Her pumps were no longer squelching against the dusty earth. Alexandra Foster had been the fastest runner in her year group ever since St Cuthbert’s sports days, but she couldn’t swim like she could run, and Finn knew it. People didn’t run at all in college, she’d found. They ambled. Everywhere. To the cafeteria, the art block – allowing the effortlessly honed muscles of youth to slacken. Alex hadn’t run anywhere since leaving high school last year, but dormant muscles had responded to her demands and she was flying. Ted was flying too. His own burst of adrenalin allowing a man of over fifty to keep pace with his seventeen-year-old child as they rushed in panicked determination to where she had left them.

Alex could hear Rodolfo’s heavy barks guiding them back to the water’s edge, rudely echoing above the peaceful gushing of the river. The Old Girl, the locals called it, Mind the Old Girl and her changing moods. They’d all had it drummed into them as kids. Dill too. He knew, he knew! Alex felt her throat tighten again, her heart twisting as they burst through the long grasses back into the clearing by the alder trees.

Finn had nearly reached Dillon further downstream when he’d turned and screamed at Alex across the water, screamed at her not to come in any deeper but to run! Run for help! So she had, back to the house, instead of floundering on uselessly against her own panic. She thought they’d still be in the water now, but they were back in the clearing, Finn kneeling in the dirt crouched over two wet gangly legs, dripping indifferently where they poked out from under him. Dill looked tiny beneath Finn’s teenage frame, as if the water had shrunk him. A mischievous little boy, playing possum.

Ted skidded in beside them on the floor, Finn moving instinctively from where he had been desperately pressing a rhythm into Dill’s sodden chest. Alex watched her father, useless again as Rodolfo’s barking turned to whimpers and Ted took over the task of thudding urgent hands into his boy’s chest.

‘You spit it out, son, you hear me? You spit it all up right now!’ he commanded.

Finn was standing over them both, his hands locked at the back of his head, motionless as he watched. The water hadn’t soothed the nettle stings angrily covering Finn’s legs where his long shorts hadn’t protected them just half an hour ago. Half an hour, when stingers and the end of the summer were their only cares in the world.

‘Son, you start breathing, son. Right now!’ Ted pleaded. Alex watched her father punctuating his need with every downward lunge against her brother’s skinny body. But Dill wasn’t doing what he was told.

Ted breathed into Dill’s bluing lips. Still, Dill’s legs didn’t move from where they peeped beneath his father’s body. One of Dill’s shoes was gone. Alex’s thoughts started to fire off like the cracker-bombs their mum had confiscated from Dill that morning. The world seemed to fall away then, numb beyond the mystery of that one missing red pump. Dill couldn’t walk home with only one shoe! Where was it? He had been wearing them both when Alex had followed Finn into the undergrowth, away and out of sight for just a few silly minutes. They needed to find that shoe, right now, right—

Alex heard her father’s voice falter. ‘Dillon Edward Foster. You cough it up, son … or your mother is going to be awful upset.’

I only left him for a minute … But Alex wasn’t as sure now. She’d been distracted.

‘Dillon Foster, BREATHE!’

Alex watched in silence as her dad tried to breathe life into his child, his huge hands grappling at Dill’s expressionless face for better purchase. Alex felt the agitation lurch inside her chest. Her father wasn’t being gentle any more, he shouldn’t be so rough with him! Didn’t he realise? He was going to hurt him.

Something warm spilled down both of Alex’s cheeks.

‘BREATHE, GOD DAMN IT, BREATHE!’ Ted shook Dill as if trying to rouse him from a stubborn sleep. He sank his mouth over his son’s again and, at last! Alex thought she saw Dill shift beneath their father’s solid frame. She held her breath … Yes! She could definitely hear it, a new sound! A breathy, jarring sound! Struggling to make its way clear of where it originated.

Something gave in the pit of her stomach. Oh, Dill! Thank—

Ted turned his head from the little boy’s face, strain etched in his eyes. Alex watched her father’s chest convulsing in short, sudden jerks beneath his shirt. She’d never seen her father cry, not for anything. Alex looked to those two legs again, the shoed and the shoeless. Nothing. Dill’s body was limp again with the loss of their father’s movements to animate him.

Finn began pushing his hands up through the sides of his wet hair. He turned away to face the alder tree hanging mournfully over the passing waters, a cork archery target hanging forgotten from its trunk. Alex watched as Finn slowly crouched down to the earth again, his broad teenage shoulders closing in on him like a pair of redundant wings.

No … No! This was wrong! They’d only left him for a minute.

A broken gravelled voice cut through Alex’s fragmented thoughts.

‘Where were you?’

It didn’t sound like her dad. It didn’t look like him either. Ted’s features were contorted in a way that made his face almost foreign; laughter lines suddenly gnarled and hostile. Alex opened her mouth to speak, but there was nothing.

‘Where the hell were you?’ her father demanded, taking in the state of Alex’s nettle-stung arms and legs. Alex watched him look accusingly at Finn’s lower body, Finn’s matching affliction where the stingers had got him too. Finn’s shirt was inside out. Ted was piecing it together, Alex could see the furious disbelief growing in her father’s eyes and waited uselessly for him to turn that look on her. When he did, it came like a hot iron through her chest, his voice broken and deformed.

‘YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE WATCHING MY SON!’

CHAPTER 1

Not everything can be damned-well helped! Sometimes, all you can hope for is time and if you’re goddamned lucky … distance.

Alex was buttering her way through another loaf of bread with enough vigour that the bulbous handle of the butter knife had indented her fingers. She stopped herself before tearing through another slice of extra value wholemeal and shook the words from her head. There had been other words too, following her down the years like a long shadow. But these were the only words she could do anything with – all she had to offer her family as pitiful recompense for the damage that could never be undone. Time and distance.

Alex pushed her father from her thoughts and reacquainted herself with the view through the kitchen hatch. The twins were still eating their lunch, too busy devouring their own meals to notice their dad, stealthily enveloping his jacket potato inside one of the flimsy serviettes. Alex bulk bought them from the wholesaler’s every other Wednesday along with the rest of the food bank’s sundries. The 2-ply napkins weren’t really built for doggy-bagging, enshrouding food like a precious treasure to be hidden in the earth for safekeeping, but the father quietly sitting across the dining room wasn’t deterred, already slipping the wrapped jacket potato into the rucksack at his feet. Alex felt something inside her ache for him the way it had ached for Bob Cratchit when her dad had taken her and Jem to see A Christmas Carol at the Tower House Theatre. It had been a treat for being such good big sisters to their new baby brother, but Alex hadn’t been able to eat her ice-cream at the interval, she’d been so worried for poor Mr Cratchit. Alex remembered how her dad had gently patted her back through every scene, his broad hand ready with fatherly reassurance. Back when he could still look at her.

‘Three more soups please, Alex my love,’ Dan smiled, blustering into the community centre’s kitchen so quickly that his flop of black hair looked windswept. He began promptly dispensing a flurry of fresh cups of tea from the urn while Alex’s attention returned to the family out in the dining room. There was something voyeuristic about watching a grown adult hiding food for his children. Something akin to slowing down for a better look at a car accident. But then this was what it was all about, wasn’t it? This life she’d chosen. To play her small part, do good – as if a person could even up the tally of all the right and wrong they’d been party to somehow. One of the twin boys glanced up and caught Alex staring. She looked away too suddenly and immediately felt as if she’d short-changed the kid a smile. Alex hated starers. She remembered the staring as they’d all been sat in St Cuthbert’s chapel saying their goodbyes to Dill in front of all of those people. All those eyes. Tragedy and rubber-necking were old friends, her father had said with the arrival of weeping relatives to the church. Wailing like banshees, despite having never sent Dill so much as a birthday card when he was alive. Alex tried to recall their faces now, those obscure weeping relatives who’d come to support the four of them with their lingering embraces and heavy knowing looks, but her memory had clung to very little of that day beyond the desolation in her mother’s features and the stiffness in her father’s back.

‘Bugger me, Alex! How many sarnies are you making? What are you going for … edible Jenga?’

Another slice of bread gave under the rigours of clumsy buttering. Alex took stock of the bread mountain and grimaced. ‘Sorry. I was just …’

‘Away with the fairies?’ Dan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you OK today? You look tired. A bit spun-out.’

Alex had told Dan, once. The very brief version. Peppered with a few hazy justifications for not visiting her hometown much any more. Busy lives. Long car journeys. A troublesome allergy to her mum’s beloved dogs. ‘No, I’m good, thanks. I didn’t sleep much last night. Bloody car alarm outside the flats,’ she groaned.

‘Yeah, I really hate that.’ Dan looked justly sceptical, but of course he wouldn’t realise what today meant. Few people would, not even the banshees. Would they be thinking of Dill today? Would they remember to imagine him turning nineteen, handsome and strong, towering over his mother and sisters? It was official. As of today, there had been more birthdays spent lighting a candle for Dill than watching him blow one out. Nine years with; ten years without. His short life seemed to get shorter each year.

‘Sure you didn’t just have a hedonistic weekend, Foster? Been out larging it with Mr Right, maybe? About time he turned up.’

Alex smiled. Her weekend had consisted largely of a thousand variations of Dill’s imagined adult life. Drinking in The Cavern with their dad. Globetrotting with a girlfriend. Teaching his kids to ride their bikes. The fantasies were endless, but they always ended the same way – a warm summer’s evening back in Eilidh Falls, a family gathered again, laughter, children with Dill’s quirky dimple or other features of his, running around the same gardens they’d all played in as children.

‘You wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Mr Right? If he’d turned up and rocked your world?’

Alex took a deep breath and centred herself. ‘Sorry. I guess a lady never tells.’

‘Blimey, twins.’ Dan exclaimed pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Can’t be easy. How old are they, seven? Eight maybe?’

The children out in the dining area were finishing the last of their bangers and mash almost simultaneously. They were at that threshold between little boys and young lads; a few adult teeth peeping from lips unapologetically slathered in gravy. The age of mischief, her mum had called it. Dill had taught them all a lot about mischief.

Alex watched those two boys and swallowed against an unexpected snag in her throat. ‘They’re seven. Dad’s first time. He’s just squirrelled.’

‘Ah,’ Dan acknowledged, his head furrowing beneath his flop of hair. ‘Well no wonder I couldn’t tempt him with the soup. He wasn’t gonna slip that into his backpack for later. Spud was it?’

‘I probably should’ve made the situation clearer,’ Alex replied. But she hated it. Walking bemused newcomers through the procedure, hitting them with the spiel on support workers and benefits entitlement before they could sit down and enjoy a meal in peace. The twins’ father had wandered in to the Trust’s lunchtime session more wide-eyed and bewildered than the kids; that familiar mixed heavy look of desperation and gratitude nearly always held together by a debilitating undercurrent of this is not my life! Alex got it. This wasn’t really her life either, at least not the one she’d once envisaged.

Dan sighed, retrieving a replacement jacket potato from one of the ovens ‘Well, he’s going to need all his strength while the kids are still off for the summer hols. Is Mum here too?’

Alex regarded the two young boys, wondering when their last opportunity to get into mischief had been. ‘I think Mum’s left. After Dad was made redundant.’

Dan finished bothering with the potato and shook his head. ‘Blimey. Tough break for the kids. But who are we to judge, right?’

It had been part of the training when Alex had first started here after ditching uni. Listen, yes. Encourage, yes. Second-guess the mechanics of a family’s downfall? Who was ever really qualified to do that?

‘Put the butter straight on it this time, Dan, don’t give him the little tubs.’ It was a small deterrent to squirrellers, but a deterrent nonetheless.

‘You know, it always stuns me when the mum jumps ship,’ Dan’s said quietly. ‘We bang on about equality and all that, but it’s still a shocker when it’s the dad left picking up the pieces. Know what I mean?’

Alex shrugged, but she knew exactly. Mothers pressed on, held everyone else together while their own hearts broke quietly. Hers had. Blythe would be pressing on right now, right this minute, two hundred miles away.

‘You sure you’re OK today?’ Dan was watching Alex readying the soup bowls with the same look he reserved for the elderly visitors to the food bank he worried needed more help than the trust could offer. ‘I thought it might be love but on second thoughts, you seem a bit …’

Alex’s smile was automatic. ‘Manic Mondays, Dan!’ she lied. Dan was a good guy. He’d be quick to offer his sympathies but it always felt like borrowing clothes she liked the look of, knowing they’d never fit right. ‘Now hurry up and get those soups out, they’re going cold!’

‘OK, OK … I’m going, I’m going.’ Dan loaded the last teas onto his tray and jostled back out through the kitchen doors. Alex’s thoughts meandered straight back to Eilidh Falls. She would call them all later, before they sat down to dinner together. Six o’clock, same time every year, no variations, no surprises. Alex dreaded it. She dreaded the thanks her mother would lavish on her for sending flowers and she dreaded hearing the consolatory lilt in Jem’s voice planted there by Alex’s perpetual absence. But most of all, Alex dreaded the complete normality of the conversation she would have with her dad. The shooting of the breeze. She had to wonder what they would have done for conversation all these years had it not been for oil changes and tyre pressure.

‘Oi.’ Dan’s face popped through from the other side of the hatch and startled her. ‘You don’t fool me, Alex. I might be a speccy kitchen hand with a flair for jazzy garnishes,’ Dan waved the tray of food and drinks flamboyantly past the servery hatch for Alex’s appraisal, ‘but I’m tuned in to the ways of women, you know. I know what’s eating you.’ He looked over his shoulder towards the twins playing air hockey with the condiments on the table. ‘You’re really worrying about them, aren’t you?’ Alex’s thoughts shifted from one broken family to another. She sent a small request into the universe that a little time and distance might help them too.

‘They’ll be OK, Alex,’ Dan reassured. ‘Look at them.’ One of the twins began giggling at something his father had just done with the pepper pot. ‘They might be going through the wringer but they’re still a family. A family can get through anything if they just stick together. Am I right?’

Alex could already feel the return of that automatic smile.

CHAPTER 2

‘Crappy neon, Alex. Neon! It’s a florist’s not a bloody tattoo parlour! You should see it all lit up at night. One big, craptastic eyesore.’

‘Jem, please stop saying craptastic, darling. You sound like a teenage boy.’ Alex heard their mother sigh in the background and allowed herself a little one of her own so the other two Foster women couldn’t hear it. The call was on loudspeaker. It was Blythe’s way of pulling Alex as best she could back into the heart of the family home while she prepared the meal Alex never came back to eat.

Jem exhaled irritably again. ‘Carrie always did have a flair for cheapening her environment.’

‘Jaime Foster, you catty girl.’ Alex heard their mother tease.

‘Better a cat than a total bitch, Mum.’

‘Oh, Jem.’ Their mum didn’t like bad language of any sort. Never had, although Blythe would turn a deaf ear if Ted or the girls used an obscenity so long as there was a legitimate reason. Like stubbing a toe, or winning the lottery. Not that anyone had ever won the lottery.

‘Alex knows what I mean, mum,’ Jem called back to Blythe. ‘You know what I mean, right Al?’

Alex was decompressing, gradually leaving the carnage of Dill’s birthday the way those crazy scuba divers she sometimes watched on Discovery would gradually leave a doomed shipwreck in the murky depths, steadily and cautiously in case they got ‘the bends’. Returning to the surface of Foster family life felt a lot like that sometimes. Something to take steady before the change in pressure did something catastrophic to Alex’s system. Thankfully, although Jem’s evergreen hang-ups with Carrie Logan – arch-frenemy since their days at Eilidh High – had never made much sense to Alex, they were good enough to change the subject from Blythe and Jem’s visit down to the churchyard earlier. (It had been one of those trivial fallings out between teenage girls, Jem had claimed, the kind that burn on ferociously like the light from a dead star, years after the main event.)

Alex could feel the tension leaving her shoulders as Jem vented about Carrie. It felt good. Normal. This must be what it felt like for those mental free-divers, Alex always thought, when they found oxygen again after plumbing the depths on just one devoted lungful of air.

Alex had taken a reassuring breath of her own just before dialling her parents’ number. It hadn’t been half as uncomfortable as she always prepared herself for. It never was. She shouldn’t be so hypersensitive; she had no right. They all deserved so much more from her and what did she do? Drag her heels all day as if phoning her family was the worst thing in the world. You will remember this next year, Alex. You will remember that you make it worse, not them. But guilt was a lot like love, doing funny things to the mind.

Jem had railroaded the conversation beautifully as ever. Jem was an excellent railroader, a seasoned expert at smoothing the awkward away with a nice thick layer of normality, as if they were all just enjoying a regular everyday catch-up with each other. Blythe too, as unwaveringly warm as she was thoughtful, had gushed about the flowers Alex had sent home, lest Alex’s woefully inadequate annual gesture ever go un-championed. ‘Oh, Alex … sunflowers and thistles!’ Blithe had delighted, ‘Such a simple posy but, just so beautiful, darling. Really, the perfect choice. Ted? Come tell Alex how beautiful those sunflowers are,’ her mum had encouraged. ‘Your dad commented on them, darling, and you know how oblivious Foster men are. Did you know, your father wanted sunflowers at our wedding? Your grandma Rosalind said they weren’t a traditional choice though, so that was that.’

Alex did know that. She also knew how fond her dad was of the colour the thistles gave to the hillside behind the farmhouse, but she wouldn’t allow herself to question who it was exactly she always sent the flowers for. Ted hadn’t gotten round to mentioning the sunflowers when he’d finally come on the line anyway. He’d had to dash off on a callout, thinning out their already skinny chat about the price Alex was paying for diesel down south.

Alex felt another pang of guilt. As soon as she’d heard the front door closing after her dad at the other end of the line, that tightness in her chest had begun to release. She was resurfacing.

‘Boring you, am I?’ Jem asked.

‘You’re boring me a little bit, darling,’ Blythe echoed. Alex could tell her mother had her head in the Aga. Blythe was exceptional at keeping her kids and cooking in check at the same time.

‘No … Sorry, Jem.’ Alex smiled.

‘You know what I mean, though, don’t you?’

Alex rallied herself. ‘About what?’

‘The neon!’ Jem asserted.

‘Sure. Neon … for a florist’s.’ Alex agreed. ‘I mean, if Carrie’s making crazy decisions like that, what else is she getting up to in there, huh?’ She was teasing, but Jem missed it, her high-school nemesis was still ram-raiding her thoughts. Alex thought she heard her mother laugh but it was difficult to be sure over the clanking of the table being set.

‘Exactly,’ Jem huffed, ‘that cow is not to be trusted.’

‘Jem!’ Blythe implored. ‘Change the record.’

Dill’s birthday had become sacred, more sacred than Christmas even and Christmas wasn’t a day for crap or bitch or cow either.

‘You can’t tell me off, Mum. I’m twenty-four.’ Jem let out a sudden yelp. ‘And you can’t whack me with a wooden spoon, Mum!’

‘Want to bet, young lady?’

Alex smiled into the phone. It was impossible not to feel steadied by her mother. Throughout everything, Blythe had held the balance.

‘I’m sure there are more riveting topics you and Alex can talk about besides Carrie Logan, Jem, surely? Can’t you gossip about men, or diets or something … like normal sisters?’

It had occurred to Alex years ago that she and Jem were not normal sisters, not if swapping juicy titbits about boyfriends and diets was the standard. Alex still wasn’t wholly sure whether she should feel more or less sad about that. It wasn’t love or affection she and Jem were missing, but years. Those intense teenage years where experiences and emotions were heightened and giddy and sisters confided and shared. Alex had left for uni and overnight it was as if something seismic had shifted leaving Alex on one side of a gaping chasm and Jem on the other. Not just their age gap. Alex could feel something else there stuck between them, something more than five big teenage years. Whatever it was, Alex had never poked at it, in case it turned out she was responsible for that too.

The phone had fallen silent. Something furtive seemed to be going on at the other end. ‘OK, OK,’ Jem whispered. She feigned an over-excited tone. ‘So guess who we saw? At the church?’

Alex ran through the usual suspects. Blythe had already told her how Susannah and Helen had each left flowers for Dill this morning, but other than Blythe’s old choir-buddies and the Reverend no-one else sprang to mind. ‘I give up. Who did you see?’

Jem laughed then. An odd, pre-cursory chortle. ‘Guess.’ But Alex didn’t have time to guess, Jem couldn’t hold it in. ‘Only Finn.’

Alex felt her thoughts slow down, sinking to the bottom of her brain like globules of wax in a lava lamp – heavy, vivid, helpless colour.

Finn. She’d been pressing that name to the back of her mind all day and Jem had just let it loose. Thoughts of Dill nearly always came piggy-backed by thoughts of Finn. Bound together by time and circumstance.

Jem was riding out the pause. All of a sudden, she could wait all day. Alex made a grab for something coherent. ‘Finn? But …’ she managed.

‘I know, right?’

‘Finn’s back in the Falls? But … I thought …’

‘I know. The rover’s returned and, by the looks of things, he’s all done with the intrepid explorer bit.’

Alex could feel a warm uncomfortable sensation brewing over the back of her neck. Jem would test her this way, now and again. She’d poke Alex like a bruise just to gauge if she was still tender, and all Alex could do was do her best not to flinch. It was like being ambushed. Stupid really, that she would be ambushed by this of all news. Eilidh Falls was his home, after all, of course he wasn’t going to stay away forever.

Alex held the phone, waiting to hear the next nuggets of Jem’s reconnaissance back home to filter down the line. Surprise began to twist into resignation. Finn had gone back to settle down, with a wife probably. And a family. Children. Beautiful children, sharing his glorious scruffy hair and playful eyes. He could’ve met a thousand women as he’d backpacked and odd-jobbed his way around the planet, exotic and captivating like the places he’d daubed on his bedroom wall. His ‘Great Adventure List!’ Their list.

Alex waited for news of the impossibly beautiful wife and their impossibly beautiful offspring to sock her one through the earpiece. Blythe had gone quiet in the background. She’d have been pleased for sure to bump into him, Alex knew it. Her mum’s fondness for Finn had never waned. Blythe had never blamed Finn.

‘Mum turned into a bashful teenager when she saw him, didn’t you, Ma? She thinks he’s even more handsome with a bit of colour on him.’

‘I was not bashful, Jem. I just think it’s a shame that boy hasn’t been snapped up. He should be bouncing a small child around on those lovely broad shoulders of his by now. “Too busy for love”? How can anyone ever be too busy for love?’

No wife. No impossibly beautiful children. Something briefly floated inside Alex before she could stop it, like a hot air balloon momentarily lifting a few inches from the earth before bobbing back down again with a thud. Finn was single then. Fab. Just as it was fab whenever George Clooney came back onto the market. Fab and uplifting and irrelevant all at once.

‘I wonder,’ Blythe lilted, ‘perhaps he’s gay now. He has been broadening his horizons for the last two years. I’ll bet he’s tried all sorts of new things. Food and … well, whatnot.’

Alex startled. Gay? Gay? Finn was not gay! No way. You couldn’t be that close to a person and not know something like that, Alex decided with ultimate certainty.

At the other end of the phone Jem was being uncharacteristically quiet, waiting for Alex to bite. Alex shrugged as if her sister could see it. ‘Susannah must be happy. To have him back safe and sound,’ she bumbled.

Finn had spent the last two years somewhere the ogher side of the planet. Had he been walking it all out of his system the way he used to, only instead of rambling around the countryside he’d gone rambling around the globe? Two years as far away as he could …

‘I guess. He was painting the railings on St Cuthbert’s wall, you know. Finn’s the new maintenance guy about town. He’s got the contract for the church. He’s re-opened Torben’s hardware shop too. On the high street.’ Jem’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And in case you were wondering, throwing tools around hasn’t done him any harm either, Al. He’s like … buff now. No more noodle arms,’ Jem chirped.

Alex’s lava lamp brain was heating up. Torben’s? Right across the street from the garage? Alex imagined her father’s mood each time he looked out across the high street. They would be virtually face to face, every single day. Alex swallowed. Her dad would have an ulcer by New Year.

‘He asked after you, Al.’

Blythe had moved back into motion in the background but the clinking of tableware had become more delicate while the conversation played out between her daughters.

Alex’s thoughts were swirling faster and faster now. ‘Erm … That’s nice.’ That’s nice? And the rest. Alex expected Jem to laugh again but Jem was waiting it out instead. Well what did Jem expect her to say? Did he, Jem? DID HE? What did he ask after me, exactly? Did he ask if I’m sorry I cut him loose like a ground rope? Whether I’m sorry for what I said? Did he ask if it still hurts when I think about him?

There was a light thrumming in Alex’s ears and she forgot briefly about what Jem was or was not saying at the other end of the line for a moment, suddenly taken aback by just how many of those statements she could answer with a resounding yes.

‘He asked if you might be around for the Viking Festival. He couldn’t believe the hype now either but he said it would be good to see it all in full swing. He also said it would be good to see you.’

Something cold danced down Alex’s spine. It was always mind-boggling that Finn had ever wanted to set eyes on any of them ever again. Alex closed her eyes and pictured her dad in his Christmas pudding jumper standing over Finn in their front yard, wild and enraged as Finn’s blood had mingled with the whipped cream on his best shirt. The resistance in Finn’s expression, the horror in Susannah’s as she and Blythe had shielded Finn where he sat awkwardly amongst the shattered crystal on the path.

Alex’s heart was gently pattering, just at the recollection. They shouldn’t be having this conversation. Her dad could walk back into the house at any moment and hear them all, chatting away, saying that name in his kitchen.

‘Yes, darling, why don’t you come on up here for the Viking Festival? It’s only the weekend, you wouldn’t need to miss any work.’ Alex took a few extra breaths. They were both in on it, Mum and Jem. Finn was home, get Alex back there too and hey, presto! Lightning might strike. Didn’t they ever learn? ‘It really would be lovely to see you, Alexandra.’ There was a tinge of pleading in her mother’s voice. It hurt just to hear it.

‘I don’t think I can make it, Mum. We’re so short-staffed, weekends are for catch-up,’ she lied, ‘next year, for definite.’ To her mind it was a simple equation. Stay away from the Falls and nothing ugly like that would ever happen again.

Alex heard the front door of her parents’ home rattle open in the background. ‘Forgot my damned phone,’ Ted groaned, his heavy boots trouncing across the hallway into the kitchen. All three Foster women fell silent.

‘You girls still gassing?’ Alex heard her father ask. ‘Who’s the big subject now then?’

The thrumming in Alex’s ears had suddenly elevated to a thud inside her skull. She wanted to reach down the phone line and gather up all the particles of the name they’d all just been so carelessly bandying around between them.

Jem and Blythe both offered an answer to Ted’s question at the same time.

‘Flowers.’

‘Vikings.’

Alex just held her breath.

CHAPTER 3

Free-diving. Now there was a paradox if Alex had ever heard one. How could depriving yourself of vital breathing apparatus ever be pedalled as liberation? There was nothing free about it, Alex decided, cautiously navigating a path through the cool water of the swimming pool, repeating with each tentative stroke the mantra her mother had taught her.

In through the nose, out through the mouth … nice and steady, you’re doing it. This was at least rung number three on her ‘fear ladder’. You had to build a fear ladder to climb, metaphorically, if you wanted to face your fears; she’d seen it on Dr Phil. Lolloping in the Jacuzzis or having a blast in the hydro-spa over by the shallow end would’ve been respectable first steps, Alex really should’ve started with those on that first, ill-fated, visit to the gym pool. Only she hadn’t realised at the time that a person could actually faint underwater. Lucky for Alex an eager teenage lifeguard with the very strong pincer grasp had fished her out and attempted unnecessarily to administer mouth-to-mouth.

‘Oh bless her, she still has her tag in,’ one staff member had astutely observed of Alex’s brand-new-for-the-occasion swimming cozzie.

‘Nice suit though, it’s one of the second-skin range we sell in the in the gym shop,’ Alex had heard another reply.

‘Which colour is that?’

‘Looks like the Torpedo.’

‘She doesn’t swim like a Torpedo. She should’ve bought the Pebble.’

Alex cringed. Just the memory of her foray into the deep end was enough to jellify her legs again. She felt her rhythm beginning to slip and locked eyes on the pool edge ahead of her.

In through the nose, Al … Better. Much better.

She’d get there. Back to that point she was at once upon a time, before she started letting the anxiety win. When she could still enjoy a nice, invigorating dip.

Her breathing was steady. There was definitely something in her mum’s advice. It was far easier controlling her breathing with a rambling inner monologue. Blythe’s mantra wasn’t as jazzy as the Ain’t no thing! version Alex had heard on Oprah’s self-help special, but it was still coming in handy in the wake of Alex’s new found bravery with the wet stuff.

Alex heard a splash too close on her right and tried not to falter again. Her concentration was rubbish tonight. Jem and her mum had taken something from her without realising it earlier this evening. The tension was supposed to ease after calling home, that’s how Dill’s birthday always worked. Only now she felt weighted down by something new, something she hadn’t anticipated. It had been niggling at her since she’d put down the phone to them. Finn setting up shop, right across the street from Foster’s Auto’s.

Why can’t you ever just take the easier route, Finn? It was a thought that had whispered through her head so many times before. And as ever, it came shadowed by another. Why did you always expect him to, Alex?

Yes. Why did she? She was selling him short, again and again and again, slipping straight back into the same old habit as if it were a favourite sweater. Had she forgotten? All sweaters had been returned. Lines had been drawn, ties cut, mix-tapes given back.

Another splash to the right and Alex’s coordination left her.

Don’t panic … don’t panic … but somebody else’s leg brushed against hers under the water then and it was all over. It was too late, she was already rearing up like a woman demented. One of the senior swimmers was blinking curiously at Alex through her goggles.

Brilliant, Alex! That had nearly been two widths in a row. You wimp. You big fat bloody wimp.

Alex made it to the edge of the pool and heard a giggle as she clambered out beside the Monday night couple. They came every week and spent most of the session huddled cosily in the Jacuzzi, although the guy had ventured into the main pool a few times. He’d done his Daniel Craig in Speedos impression past Alex last week. She’d stopped and pretended to fix the locker key strapped to her wrist while he’d thrashed past and Alex had discreetly hyperventilated.

Alex squelched her way beneath the poolside clock and through to the changing rooms. Nearly eight-thirty. Good. Enough was enough for one day. Just a couple more hours and Dill’s birthday could be put to rest for another year and she wouldn’t have to think about awkward exchanges with her dad for a while.

Alex opened her locker and made a grab for her shampoo and towel. She nudged her jeans accidentally and her phone slipped from her pocket. She whipped her hand out, somehow catching it before it hit the floor.

‘Whoops. Butter-fingers. Nearly lost it that time.’ Alex looked along the lockers to one of the old chaps who came swimming every week too. White-haired and friendly-faced, Alex always felt a bit guilty for curtailing their conversations, but the old lad didn’t seem to realise the perils of wearing white swimming trunks and Alex always found herself glancing down like a wide-eyed child to check if they were any less see-through.

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. ‘Nearly, that time.’

Alex’s eyes dipped without warning. It was like being told not to look at the sun as a kid. Don’t look, don’t look!

‘You should try dropping a cigar in your lap, young lady. I was driving my golf cart last weekend, burned straight through my trousers it did. Just look at the blister it’s left me with,’ he said, pointing to his hairy upper thighs.

Alex glanced sheepishly towards him. ‘Oh yes, would you look at that.’ Penis. That’s all Alex had just seen. Old man penis. Actually it was worse than looking at the sun. Far, far worse. She wanted to take her eyeballs out and wash them in the pool.

Alex’s phone bleeped. She seized her chance at a diversion. ‘Sorry, I really have to take this,’ she fibbed. ‘Would you excuse me?’ Alex flashed him a smile and slipped into one of the changing stalls. Jem’s name blinked demandingly on the caller display, puncturing the stillness of the cubicle. Thank you, sis. She couldn’t chance another look at those trunks, she wouldn’t sleep tonight.

Alex unlocked her phone. She just needed to kill enough time for the old lad to finish in his locker. Twenty-three missed calls, Jem? Tickly tracks of water were streaking down Alex’s back and shoulders where her wet hair clung. She rubbed them away and frowned at the urgency on her phone. That was a lot of calls from Jem. Carrie Logan must have death-stared her or something.

Alex hit the button on her phone and listened to the most recent of Jem’s voicemails. Jem’s words reached up over Alex’s collarbone, conquering the silence of the cubicle, pressing in on her with the same cold claustrophobia as the swimming pool.

Mum’s sick … suspected stroke … need to come home.

Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze.

Alex held her breath as if she were still in the pool and hit redial. She waited – Mum’s sick … Mum’s sick … with each impatient second.

‘Alex?’

‘Jem! What happened? Is she OK?’

Everything around Alex had faded into oblivion. Jem was talking in whispers. ‘I’m not supposed to have my phone on. We don’t really know yet for sure. Malcolm Sinclair found her. At St Cuthbert’s. In the churchyard. Alex, I … I can’t …’

‘Slow down, Jem! Where is she now? Where’s Dad?’

‘Kerring General. We’re here now.’

Jem wasn’t a crier, even when she was a kid. When Robbie Rushton stuck a drumstick through her spokes and Jem had flown straight over her handlebars she hadn’t cried, she’d pinned Robbie to the ground instead and given him a dead arm. A whole week had gone by before anyone had realised Jem had fractured that wrist, the same one she’d used to punch Robbie with. But Jem’s voice was wavering now. This alone made Alex want to cry immediately. She clamped a hand over her mouth in case.

‘They’re all over her, Alex. They said time was the most critical thing but Malcolm got her here really quickly. We’re so lucky he was in the churchyard, Al.’

Suspected stroke. The words swirled in Alex’s ears like trapped water. Blythe didn’t like a fuss. To be bundled into Malcolm Sinclair’s police car and rushed anywhere would have been beyond mortifying for her. ‘She’s going to be OK, isn’t she, Jem?’

There was a flurry of activity in Jem’s background, Alex strained to make any of it out.

‘You know Mum … tough as Dad’s old boots.’ But Jem had hesitated.

Alex looked at the scant belongings she had with her. The urge was there – keys, coat, get home to Mum – and then the inevitable thought.

Dad.

Alex forced herself not to think about what she would say if she went back up there. She could already hear the first whispers in her head … This was always going to happen, Alex, eventually. You knew that. Because every one of Dill’s birthdays without him had been one too many, and there was only so much quiet heartbreak the human body could take, even her mum’s.

No. She couldn’t go up there. It would be better for everyone if she didn’t. One less thing for them all.

‘Alex, are you still there?’

Alex took in a deep breath, just to remind her lungs that they still could. ‘I’m here.’

Jem sniffed. ‘Alex?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You need to come home.’

2nd November 2006

‘You need to come home.’

Alex inhaled, deep and steady, filling her lungs with as much of his delicious scent as possible.

‘I don’t want to hide behind a phone, Foster. I want to do this properly. Show him how serious we are, about doing things right.’

Anyone would think Finn was going to ask for her hand in marriage. They were a cool billion light years from that. Well, maybe they could just make it out of their teens first, at least.

Alex watched the candlelight dancing over the far wall, laying soft shadows over the edge of Finn’s face. They’d synchronised, his naked torso rising with breath as hers gave its own away. Rise and fall, the movement subtle like a gentle tide, so slight and easy it felt as if she might not need oxygen at all any more. He was enough.

Finn had a look of curious wonder in his eyes, a need finally met. Perhaps it was just the play of the light over his face, but Alex felt that way too, as if she’d made it to where she was always supposed to have been. She thought she’d be embarrassed, but it felt like the most natural thing in the world, to lie here beside him now, skin cool and sticky from their first adventure of each other. She never wanted to move again, her body wasn’t finished nuzzling in the glorious afterglow of what they’d finally just done. What she already needed to do again.

‘I missed you, Foster.’

Alex held back the goofy grin trying to make its way over her face, as if too sudden a moment might make it all disappear again like an illusion. ‘I missed you too, Finn.’

His face was close enough to her that she could see tiny flecks of hazel in the green of his irises, the contours where laughter had left its footprint in the lines beside his eyes. Finn ran his fingertips from Alex’s hip along her naked spine and began trailing delicate circular shapes over her shoulders. Alex felt her goose-pimples rise to greet him. Finn had found her again. He’d come all this way and he’d found her.

Alex reached her fingers to tease a lock of hair behind his ear. She’d been so buried in her coursework she hadn’t noticed the sudden arrival of winter in the city, not until she’d watched it walk in on the ends of his hair. She’d opened the secured door of her student halls and there he was, waiting under a tree, pearls of new snow clinging to the same long layers he’d worn through college. Nearly two hundred miles and he’d been standing there as if the end of the earth wouldn’t be too far.

‘Your mum told me how to find you,’ he’d said. And that was it, the snowflake that tipped the avalanche.

It was a perfect crisp November night and they’d spent it, some of it, talking through the year they’d spent adrift while the Old Girl had carried on flowing and the world had carried on turning. And now here they were, naked and blissfully fatigued in a single bed in a pokey little bedroom in a student house a million miles away from Eilidh Falls. And it was perfect.

Blythe had given Finn the address. Alex sent a quiet thank you out into the snowy darkness and hoped her mum would somehow feel it and think of Alex and Finn right then. Blythe was a sucker for a good love story; she’d probably compared theirs to the kind of love all of Blythe’s favourite operas were made from. Of adversity and triumph and explosions of something precious happening between two people. Luminous and powerful, darling! She would say. Love as beautiful and terrifying as a bolt of lightning!

Finn propped himself up on an elbow. ‘What are you thinking about?’

Alex’s hand naturally migrated to the hardness of his stomach. The grin got the better of her as soon as she opened her mouth. ‘Lightning.’

Finn’s mouth gave in to a smile too. He was still beautiful; the tiny scar Ted’s wedding band had left over the bridge of his nose hadn’t changed him. A monster had risen in Alex’s dad that night. Thankfully, none of them had ever seen it since.

Alex didn’t see Finn’s head furrow. ‘OK, so what are you thinking about now?’

She didn’t want to let any more thoughts of her dad in. ‘Nothing,’ Alex replied but she already knew it was too late. She stroked Finn’s side. A futile gesture, as if she was trying to tame a piece of her coursework before the clay hardened and left her with something incomplete, misshapen.

‘Let me tell him, Alex.’

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Alex, he can punch me all he likes if it makes him feel better. It won’t change anything.’

‘I know. I just … don’t want you to say anything that …’

‘But I want to. I want to say it to him. I love you, Foster.’

‘I love you too.’ She really did. It was the only certainty. But Finn’s expression had already changed.

He cut her a smile and nodded softly to himself. ‘I know you do, Foster. You just don’t want anyone to know it.’

CHAPTER 4

The sky was like a lingering bruise on the outskirts of town. Alex pulled off the main road and cruised alongside the Old Girl into Eilidh Falls, the light still steeped in the eeriness of a new day. Just over two hours without a dip into a service station was a new personal best, made possible only by non-existent traffic and two eyelid-expanding double espressos before leaving the flat.

Alex pinched between her eyes, trying to stave off her tiredness. Her dad would go mad if he knew how little sleep she’d had. She shifted in the driver’s seat, ignoring the growing ache in her back. This close to home it was pointless trying to push Dill away. He was all around her here; Dill belonged to Eilidh Falls. The tiny pocket of the world that had claimed him forever. Was it the same for Jem, she wondered, when she came home too? Jem played her cards so close to her chest you never could tell.

Another sign counting down the miles back to the Falls whizzed by the truck window. Time and distance, that’s all her dad had wanted, and she’d delivered. Now she could feel it all being undone, one mile at a time. It was always this way on the drive back to the Falls. Dill always found his way into her thoughts, transporting her back there again, setting her down perpetually on the banks of the Old Girl with him, their weeping father, and Finn in his mournful silence, as if those few cataclysmic moments had soldered them all together forevermore.

Finn had tried so hard, but Ted was never going to see it.

Alex shuddered at the recollection of that Christmas. That first Christmas after. He didn’t know what he was doing, it was the drink, not your father, Blythe had tried to say evenly as she’d gathered up sticky shards of Granny Ros’s Tutbury crystal bowl from the garden path. That was the last time Alex had seen Finn or Susannah anywhere near the house. It was also the last Christmas Alex had seen her dad anywhere near a drink, and the start of all that prickly quiet between them. Thick grey silences wedged between all the safe things they still managed to talk about, like ice forming between rocks, threatening to shatter them both.

A heavy grogginess was starting to filter in behind Alex’s eyes. She tried to keep them focused on the road ahead. Dad would never say it, that this new catastrophe was most likely a consequence of Blythe having to wish Dill a happy birthday down at St Cuthbert’s, but it would be there, in one of those silences where the rest of Alex’s failings resided.

A flash of black came up on Alex’s right side. Some sleek four-by-four sped aggressively around her. She let them pass like one of the more able swimmers back at the leisure centre, as if she had any choice. Alex checked her rear view for any more surprises. She was nearly home. Get it together, Alex. Mum needs you on the ball.

Nope, she would not think about Finn’s return any more. It wasn’t even her place. Mum was all that mattered. She would get there and find out her part to play. She would get her mum’s things together, help her wash and dress if needs be, grocery shop, cook for them, tidy the house. She’d only be back, what, a day or two? There were a hundred ways to pass a couple of days. All she had to do was help Blythe get back on her feet, and keep as best she could out from under her father’s. Simple. Everything was going to be fine, Alex smiled. It wasn’t like her Mum ever even got ill. Give it a week max and Blythe would show them all, this was just a blip in an otherwise blemish-free record of health. A momentary stumble. Wasn’t she due one after all these years? All these birthdays? Alex gripped the steering wheel a little more assuredly. Her mum would soon be back on her feet, and then Jem could get back to London and Dad would be back busting a gut keeping the garage going and Alex could just get back out of everyone’s way and they could all breathe again.

A particularly plucky yawn suddenly took hold and Alex gave in to it wholeheartedly. She sat up a little higher in her seat and began watching the familiar landscape of her youth tumble past the windows of her battered old Nissan.

Welcome to Eilidh Falls!

The sign had changed; for the benefit of the tourists, no doubt. Beneath the salutation, an image carved into the wood of a Viking longship under a hail of arrows fired from the banks of the Old Girl. As soon as Alex rolled past that image, the illusion that any amount of time or distance could ever really make a difference to her dad quickly evaporated.

CHAPTER 5

It hadn’t been a nightmare exactly, Jem decided. More of a troubled sleep kind of thing, like in her teens. A sort of half-hearted insomnia. But definitely not a nightmare. Nightmares featured monsters and fear and peril, not the constant dull weight of words left unsaid.

Jem fidgeted in her old bed trying to get comfortable. She never slept well in her parents’ house any more, she realised. Not since those hideous years in high school when the late-night anxieties had first kicked in. It wasn’t easy sleeping on a lie every night, notching up the days she was keeping them all in the dark. Maybe her mum was right, the therapy might’ve helped Jem if she’d stuck with it, but it had seemed so OTT at the time.

‘Jem! It’s 3am!’ she remembered her mum rasping from the kitchen doorway, eyes blinking and vacant after catching Jem fixing a peanut butter sandwich for the third night in a row. ‘Is it nightmares, sweetheart? Or is there something else that’s bothering you? You haven’t been yourself lately, Jem. If you’re having nightmares it might help if you talk about them.’

‘I’m OK, Mum.’ Jem had reassured. ‘I only have nightmares in the run up to maths tests, honest.’ She hadn’t mentioned those long school trips stuck with Carrie Logan and the other bimbos. Or the eve of Eilidh High’s end of year discos when Jackson Cox was always expecting a slow dance with Jem and, rumour had it, a proper good snog.

Jem lay awake in bed remembering how she had tried to play it all down to her mother. To allay the worry she had seen in the tiny furrows on Blythe’s faintly freckled forehead.

‘It’s not healthy for a fifteen year old girl to be sneaking around in the dark every night.’

‘I’m doing peanut butter, Mum, not cocaine,’ Jem had tried, but it didn’t matter. Blythe wouldn’t have it. Alex had buggered off to uni and that had left Jem alone under the spotlight. By the time she’d crawled out of bed the next morning her mum had already made the appointment.

‘She says she doesn’t want to see a shrink, Helen, but I’m not taking any chances. You can’t be too careful with … bereavement,’ Jem had overheard her mum confiding in Mrs Fairbanks.

‘You can’t be too careful with peanuts, either,’ Helen Fairbanks had replied. Blythe had taken careful to a whole new level after that.

Jem stared into the nothingness above her childhood bed and inhaled deeply. Her old bedroom still felt like a bolthole – a pocket of refuge in the middle of whatever mess their family was dealing with. She used to spend so much time in here, hiding out. Maybe that was why she’d been so rubbish at sneaking around downstairs back when her mum had kept on busting her in the kitchen – not enough practice.

Jem rolled over onto her side and looked across her bedroom bathed in twilight. Uh, now she couldn’t stop thinking about peanut butter. Maybe she could she make it down to the kitchen without disturbing Dad across the hall? She was more gentle-footed now. Her legs twitched, ready to give it a shot but then she remembered the new pup down there. The thing got all excited as soon as anyone looked at her, Dad would wake up and it wasn’t fair on him. He’d been awake half the night too, floorboards creaking under his restless pacing.

Jem’s legs twitched again. She felt a sudden need to get out of the farmhouse and get to Kerring General, just as she had the last time tragedy had hit here. When they’d brought Alex home from the Old Girl, soaking and catatonic. Alex had looked like a little wet ghost, Dill’s bow and arrows clamped in her taut hands. Just one more minute with Dill, it was all Jem had wanted, so she could take it all back, all those awful things she’d said to him that morning and tell him the truth instead. But they all just kept saying the same thing, over and over; it’s too late.

Jem wriggled down into the bedding and let her thoughts travel back to the hospital. You have to wake up, Mum, she thought anxiously. You have to be OK and you have to wake up. So I can drop my bomb on you.

Jem squeezed her eyes closed beneath the covers. In the long dark hours of the night, she’d made a vow. No more hiding, no more lies. They had a right to know. She’d tell Mum first, then Alex and Dad. Maybe it would be Dad who would try frogmarching Jem off to Dr Bullock PsychD’s office this time.

Jem flinched at the recollection of her very brief spell in therapy. Pleading had been a complete waste of breath at the time, obviously. ‘Of course you don’t need to see a shrink, Jem,’ her mum had carefully nudged, ‘but it can’t hurt just to get a few things off your chest, can it? Think of it like tidying your room.’ But Jem didn’t like a tidy room, thanks. She liked a bombsite nobody dared or desired to enter and wanted her jumbled little mind to be left just so too. Sleep was for wimps, anyway, she was fine as she was. Jem had been all set for hiding out behind one of the waterfalls up at Godric’s Gorge and dodging the appointment altogether, but then her mum had given her that look. It had stilled Jem. Dill had gone. Then Alex. Jem had known instantly what that look had meant. Please don’t let me lose this kid too. Anything was preferable to seeing her mum look that way again, even an hour with Dr Bullock.

‘I feel that Jem is likely suffering from delayed anxiety. It’s only just been a year since your son’s death, Mrs Foster. Grief can manifest itself months, sometime years, later in all sorts of ways.’

Jem shook her head against the pillow. Nitwit. Dr Bullock hadn’t the faintest idea that he’d been Jem’s unwitting accomplice.

‘The sleep issues have coincided with your sister Alexandra’s leaving for university, haven’t they?’ he’d asked. ‘The start of the Autumn term? Detachment issues? Fear of another sibling leaving the family home? All very explicable.’ All very perceptive of the doctor. Only he’d missed that the sleeplessness had also coincided with the Autumn term at Eilidh High too, and the return of two bus journeys a day with Carrie’s crew.

It had been a lot like being stuck on the school bus, trundling sluggishly through her own psychoanalysis, sitting politely while Dr Bullock made all the necessary stops on the way to his grand resolution. The friend conversation, the boyfriend conversation, the drastic-new-hair conversation. Jem had felt an inexplicable sense of relief when they’d finally gotten around to the Dill conversation.

Spilling about her argument with Dill in the days before the accident had been easy. Even sharing how she’d never thought those jagged words she’d thrown at him would be the last ones Dill would ever hear her say. She hadn’t meant to talk so much about that, but she had to give them something. And it had felt good almost, like loosening your fist and realising that your fingernails had been sticking into your palms all that time without you knowing. Her mum had nodded, as if it had all made perfect sense. This was something Blythe could work with; there was light at the end of the tunnel. Jem knew her mum had never suspected that Jem’s opening up had been an exercise in frugality. Give a little here so that the bigger things could be held back.

Jem remembered her mum’s locket pressing uncomfortably against her ear as Blythe had locked Jem in an embrace in the car park afterwards. She remembered feeling her mother’s fingers deftly teasing strands of Jem’s new hairstyle and she’d known that Blythe was mourning the loss of something more than her little girl’s hair.

‘Jem? I don’t want there to be any more secrets between us, OK? Secrets can pull people apart. Even little ones,’ Blythe had whispered.

Jem could have just said it. Right then. It had practically been a green light situation for sinking bad news. The words had been there, on the tip of her tongue. But then she’d felt the cold press of that tiny locket again, she’d pictured the little photographs it held inside of her conventional parents and their conventional marriage, and the truth had dissolved like sugar on her tongue.

‘OK, Mum,’ Jem had said. ‘No more secrets.’

CHAPTER 6

Alex slowed for the approaching turnoff to Godric’s Gorge and the run of waterfalls after which the town was named. She knew the road by heart, how many dusty laybys there were to allow the occasional passing car making its way to or from the falls, the cluster of properties that lined the dusty track there and each of the families who lived in them. In one of those properties, the large cream farmhouse with the spindly wisteria her mum couldn’t get to grow right, Alex knew her dad would be awake already, drinking his morning coffee out on the front porch, smoking his first roll-up of the day. Alex let her hand hover over her indicator before settling it back onto the gear stick. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. The hospital ward wouldn’t let her in at six-thirty and Jem would probably still be sleeping up at the house, which wasn’t going to make conversation with her dad any easier.

Jem had accused her of being paranoid. Ted wasn’t awkward around Alex, he was just usually preoccupied, that was all. Running a garage by himself took a lot of energy, didn’t it? Easy for Jem to say, she always had something useful to contribute. Knew how to pull a conversation right out of him.

Alex automatically shifted up a gear and passed the turnoff for home. No point disturbing them this early. She followed the road down off the valley. Eilidh Falls high street was deserted, the only movement where great swathes of fabric in reds and golds fluttered lazily from the street lamps lining the road through the busiest part of town. Wait, was that a … ‘Bloody hell! There’s a huge dragon hanging off the Town Hall roof …’ Alex blurted.

Jem hadn’t been kidding. She’d told Alex about Mayor Sinclair’s ramping up of the annual Eilidh Viking Festival a few times but it had never appealed, not that Alex had really grasped just how far the town had taken to gearing up for the festival, loosely based on the arrival of marauding Vikings to the area some 1200 years before.

‘Viking Fest is gonna be a national treasure eventually, Al. Like the cheese rolling in Gloucester!’

Alex let her eyes follow an endless run of circular shields all along the old library gates as she drove past. ‘Flipping heck … It looks like something off the history channel … on acid.’

Alex let her foot off the accelerator to take a slower look at the settlement of re-enactment tents down by the riverbank. Were they supposed to be the Anglo-Saxon presence then? A few of the tents looked more regal than the others, Alex was trying to get a better view and draw on her sketchy Viking knowledge from her St Cuthbert’s Primary days when something black appeared like an ominous apparition at the front end of her truck.

‘Shit!’

Alex reacted, stamping on the brake, probably harder than was necessary. She bounced in her seat while the truck jarred to a halt around her. The eyes glaring back through the windscreen at her looked amused. Alex felt herself swallow and ready an apology for the burly gentleman in the business suit who’d just stepped straight off the kerb and directly into the bloody road in front of her, but something about his smile made her hesitate. She’d only been travelling at a jogging pace and wasn’t entirely convinced that his hands braced on her bonnet, cigarette still burning away where it was sandwiched between his knuckles, wasn’t a touch overly dramatic.

Alex looked up at his face again and was reminded of a gorilla. Large and unpredictable. He definitely didn’t look like a local, tourist probably, not that the suit made any sense. Alex had nearly gotten her sorry out when he grinned. He lifted his hands and brought two balled fists down hard on her bonnet. Alex flinched. He seemed to approve of her silly girlish movement. ‘You stupid tart. Watch where you’re going,’ he delivered, his Hollywood smile sharpening the words as they left his mouth. Alex’s mouth dropped open a little, a nervous thumping started in her chest as he pushed himself off her truck and casually strolled over to the black four-by-four parked across the street. Alex swallowed and found her voice again.

‘Nice,’ she muttered, once the ape was safely back inside his truck and definitely couldn’t hear her. Alex had a rule about confrontation. She didn’t do it. Jem was the sister for that. Jem wasn’t backwards in going forwards like Alex, she was made of tougher stuff. Jem would’ve smiled sweetly just then and flipped the horrible git the Vs. Jem wouldn’t have been intimidated, she’d singlehandedly confronted a group of teenagers once for calling Millie Fairbanks Clubfoot; the girl had no fear.

Alex began cruising again along the last of the high street. She drove steadily past her father’s garage still with its heavy arched wooden doors in blue keeping her eyes well and truly off the hardware shop opposite as if merely glancing there would constitute an act of total betrayal. She drove towards the little primary school with its bright hanging baskets and sunflowers grown spindly through the summer holidays, on past the adjacent church – also St Cuthbert’s – with its newly refurbished railings and worn stone path. Her mum had been round there last night, alone, slumped over in the churchyard before Mal Sinclair had found her. Alex’s throat tightened. The hospital was only another two miles beyond the bridge, it was hard to resist pressing down a little harder on the accelerator but this was the stretch of road where Millie Fairbanks had lost two inches off her left leg after Finn’s dad had signed their faulty car off.

Alex tried to take the incline of the old bridge in the wrong gear and the truck juddered around her in protest. She dropped it down to second. Ted reckoned you could always tell a local from an outsider on how slow they took the bridge. Bloody tourists, careering in and out like they own the place. Even over the ruckus in the pub on backgammon nights, Alex’s dad had said how they’d hear the screeching of tyres when some wazzock took the bridge too fast. Every time they heard the screech, Hamish would put a pound in the pot, ready for the next time he had to have his beer-garden wall rebuilt. ‘Someone is going to get themselves killed at the bottom of that bridge someday,’ Hamish liked to warn his patrons, ‘as if the Fairbanks girl hadn’t come close enough.’

Alex took the bridge cautiously. The Old Girl and the rest of Eilidh high street fell away in her rear view mirror, Alex’s shoulders releasing a little the more the bridge shrank into the distance. A light twinkling of morning sun on water held Alex’s attention on the disappearing view. It made her feel sorry to leave it back there without a proper look, it wasn’t often she thought the Old Girl pretty. She had time for a little look.

Alex pulled over onto the side of the road in case she nearly killed anyone else before breakfast and shut the engine off. Her door cranked outwards like an arthritic hip. She sat there for a few moments with her feet on the cool earth outside the truck. It was so quiet here. Alex held her face to the sky. The air felt lighter up here in the Falls, lighter than it did back in the city anyway. Cleaner. Good for the soul. She’d taken it for granted as a child. She wanted to inflate herself with it now, purify herself with it. Alex clambered from her truck before even questioning herself and slammed the door shut behind her. The morning sun was spreading its greeting along the river catching like crystals on its changing surface. She’d spent so much energy distancing herself from this place, she’d almost forgotten its beauty.

Alex took in the view back towards the river where it cut past Hamih’s pub. You used to play Pooh sticks off that bridge with Jem, Dill Pickle. Alex would invigilate while Mum and Dad watched from The Cavern’s beer garden.

She missed him so much it ached. She missed Dill too.

None of the self-help articles ever said what to do about her dad. There wasn’t a fear ladder for that, no psychological tool that would make her apology substantial enough to brave offering it again.

You’re not here for that. You’re here for Mum. And then you’ll be gone again. Out of his way.

Alex shook off her inner monologue. She always became the same useless wimp when it came to Ted, that was a given, but Alex had decided on the drive up here that she would at least shuffle up a couple more rungs of her self-help strategy while she was here. She was going to pay a visit to an old adversary. The Old Girl looked welcoming now, winsome and pretty, just as she had been a thousand times before on still summer mornings such as this. Perfectly safe, if you chose the right spot.

Alex shuddered. That was a few rungs up yet. The Old Girl was right at the top, the end goal. She was going to wade into the Old Girl one day and she was going to do it without becoming a dithering wreck. Just like that. Tra-la-la. Alex quivered a little at the prospect. One step at a time, Dr Phil said. She could start up at the plunge pools, in the shallows. Alex found herself drifting away with her thoughts. Yes, before leaving the Falls again, she was going to achieve something. She was going to stand in the plunge pools up to her knees. That was the benchmark, that was something realistic she could aim for, a rung she could climb.

Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing, she reassured herself.

She’d seen an allegedly phobic woman on Oprah say this, again and again like a magical spell of protection while someone had steadily placed a boa constrictor around the woman’s sweaty neck. Alex had watched intently and the woman hadn’t even blinked. The not blinking thing wasn’t as impressive as having a snake near her windpipe though, in fairness.

Alex watched the sparkles on the water. ‘Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing,’ she said aloud. It felt strange. Liberating. She’d read that in the Climb your fear-ladder article too. Face your fears and assertively tell them, ‘No! I will not be a slave to you any more!’

She locked eyes on the riverbank. ‘No’, she said in a small voice, ‘I will not—’

This was ridiculous. She was losing her mind. Alex let out a little laugh. Then she cleared her throat and tried it again. All this clean air was flushing something out of her, it felt kinda good. And weird. ‘Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing!’ she called, louder this time. The wall of evergreens called back with a small echo. There were only squirrels and, rumour had it, a headless ghost she might disturb back here. Sod it, call it coffee jitters but she was going to go for it. She’d see a car coming a mile off before anyone would hear.

She took another lungful. ‘AIN’T NO THING BUT A CHICKEN WING ON A STRING—’

‘From … Burger King?’

Alex snapped her head round to her right side. Her heart hurt, like it had a stitch. It might actually have just stopped.

The mud was the first thing. New toffee-coloured mud spattered across his jaw. She glanced up and down, scanning him for possibility.

Oh God. Oh my God.

Another pain in Alex’s chest. She felt the beating in there fire up again on all cylinders. This was why kids pedalled stories of headless ghosts in the forest, the mulchy floor spongy enough that any person with a half-decent pair of trainers and a degree of athletic grace (that was Alex out then) could suddenly, soundlessly appear from the woods and scare the crap out of you.

Finn looked stunned too.

Alex didn’t know where to look. The mud was a running theme. His trainers were caked in the stuff, so were the calf muscles glistening with tiny beads of sweat. He hadn’t been a runner in his youth. He hadn’t been so defined, either. She tried to take him all in. His chest was heaving beneath his t-shirt, fervently but steady, like a racehorse. A thin white wire trailed down from the headphones either side of his face giving the rise of his chest a glancing blow on its descent to one of the pockets of his jogging bottoms. Joggers cut off at the knees. He wasn’t just a runner now, he was a hardcore runner.

Alex was dumfounded. ‘You’ve … changed colour.’ Her voice caught in her throat. Maybe he didn’t notice. He’d appeared from the trees as fluently as he did in her sleep. Alex swallowed, her heart already migrating to her mouth. Finn gave a gentle yank and sent the earplugs tumbling towards his waist.

He looked down at himself. ‘I guess that would be mostly the mud.’

It wasn’t the mud, it was adventure seeking in the southern hemisphere while Alex had been making vats of chilli con carne at the food bank. He probably smelled of coconut oil and ylang ylang now, she usually smelled of fried onions and disinfectant. His hair had changed colour too, lighter at its edges than it was. It still sat long just over his ears but it looked more deliberate now, like he’d just fallen off a billboard advertising surfboards, or cranberry juice, or something full of antioxidants.

‘You haven’t changed colour.’ He smiled. ‘Still a striking red head.’ Alex cringed at her own statement. ‘Well, actually you look a little less red than the last time we spoke if I remember right.’ He offered a half-hearted smile.

She was going to die. Right here on the spot. The last time they’d spoken had been in her student bedroom. Trying to be quick, efficient, like ripping off a plaster, hadn’t worked. There had been nothing clean and clinical about it. Just lots of arguing and hurt. And red faces, obviously.

‘Actually, you look a little pale, Foster. Are you OK?’

She hadn’t heard her name on his lips since the last moments before watching him walk away through the snow. Be kind to yourself, Foster, he’d said. Because not having the balls to go home and tell her dad about them sure as hell wasn’t being very kind to Finn.

Alex swallowed again. Finn’s breath was levelling off but hers was becoming shallower. She felt a bit fuzzy, actually.

‘I, er. Actually just, I erm … just tired, actually. Long drive.’

Finn’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t want his eyes to narrow, he was always working something out when he did that.

‘Jem said you don’t come back here. Don’t they have fast food where you live now?’ Nope, he’d lost her. ‘Burger King, wasn’t it?’ Alex cringed. The woman on Oprah hadn’t sounded like such a muppet when she’d said it. ‘Or have you come back for a run in one of the most beautiful spots in the world? It’s some morning, isn’t it?’

She felt a hand rub up the back of her neck and realised it was her own. Stop that, you’re not a child.

‘No, no … definitely not a runner. Or prolific burger eater.’ She smiled feebly.

‘But you do come back up here to the Falls though? Evidently.’

Oh God, this conversation felt like swimming. In through the nose, out through the mouth …

‘Yeah, um, not really. It’s difficult with work and stuff and …’

‘Work?’

‘Yep. I erm, work with disadvantaged people.’ Disadvantaged people? Nice one, Alex. She wasn’t exactly in the Peace Corps. Don’t try to impress him, you plonker. He’s travelled the world!

‘Disadvantaged people? Must keep you busy.’

Alex laughed a laugh that didn’t belong to her.

‘I thought when you left your university degree, you’d find another course somewhere?’

‘Ah, no.’ Alex batted the notion away, a silly childhood whimsy. ‘No I didn’t, actually. I er, I left uni for good.’

‘I know.’ He said matter-of-factly. ‘That’s too bad. Your work, all through college, I mean … you have a gift, Foster.’ He shrugged.

Alex swallowed again. Only her mother said that. Have. Not had. As if there was still discernible potential in her somewhere. Alex looked at her shoes, embarrassed if anything. Mum would’ve loved this, this meeting of theirs in the forest like two star-crossed nymphs, back when Blythe’s heart would have been still up for the excitement. Reality thudded home. ‘Actually, I have to go. I need to get to the hospital.’

The look on Finn’s face switched immediately. ‘Are you OK, Foster?’

‘Oh, no … I didn’t mean … it’s Mum. She er, she had a stroke last night.’ The words seemed to double back in her mouth and head straight back down her throat, clenching her heart in an angry fist. Suddenly there was a lump forming at the back of Alex’s throat, she could feel it coming. Don’t cry! Shit! Alex, if you cry now he’ll comfort you and then you’ll be dripping snot into his muddy chest before you know it and it’ll be all over.

‘I’m sorry, Foster. Is there anything I can do?’ Finn’s hand reached out for a second and grazed Alex’s elbow. Their skin touched briefly and she very definitely felt it, the same as before, exactly as Blythe would always describe it.

It felt like lightning.

CHAPTER 7

Ted Foster had woken up an hour ago to the sound of muffled whimpers drifting in off the landing. For a few dazed seconds, he imagined he were still a young man, sitting bolt upright in bed ready to trudge wearily across the hall to check on each of his three children, see which one of them was having a restless dream. He stretched his back through and reached up to rub the greying bristles of his face, turning to see if Blythe had woken too. Her pillow was as neat and plumped as she’d left it yesterday morning after Jem had helped her change the beds. Blythe had been grumbling about engine oil finding its way onto the bedspread again. ‘Well what can I do,’ Ted had protested, ‘if some evenings I rush my shower because I can’t wait to climb into bed with a show-stoppin’ redhead?’ Jem had started grinning at her mother then but Blythe had turned that beautiful porcelain chin of hers away in mock disapproval.

God damn it, Blythe.

The dawn was finding its way along the top edge of the curtains, waiting respectfully to be invited in. Ted took his first deep breath of the day and set a hand on the piped edging of Blythe’s pillow. She’d disapprove of all the fuss last night. All those strangers talking over her with their penlights and charts, as if she weren’t there sleeping beneath them. They were just kids. What did they know about her? A woman whose laughter they’d never contracted, whose neck they’d never smelled, whose beautiful voice they’d never heard singing on a morning.

More impatient whimpering found its way through the gap under the bedroom door. Ted set two unwilling feet on the cool floorboards and went to find the source of all that disgruntlement. He quietly opened the door so as not to wake Jem down the hall. The door shushed open. Ted looked to his feet and the bundle of straw-coloured fur waiting expectantly there. The damned thing had sniffed him out and here it was, sitting there with its head cocked ready for breakfast no doubt.

‘Made it up the stairs then?’ This was their first Labrador, he’d heard they had more spring in them than most pups. Probably should’ve gotten something with less spring, not that he’d had any intention of having any more dogs, springy or not. The Cavern was an ale house, not a pet market. The damned thing had been what Blythe would call an impulse purchase, like half the stuff she’d bring home from the supermarket. Impulse purchase was about right. There it had been, all wide-eyed peeping out the top of Roger Muir’s coat. The runt, Muir had said. Ted knew instantly that Blythe would love it. Her face had lit up like one of the kids’ when she’d seen the pup, that smile she seemed to put her whole body into. A smile she didn’t have to think about. At this time of year to bring that smile back into the house was nothing short of a blessing.

The pup cocked her head the other way.

‘If you were smarter, dog, you’d have tried my daughter’s room,’ Ted sighed. The girls had always gone gaga for puppies, just like Blythe. Ted wasn’t one to shout it from the rooftops but he’d always quietly beamed when somebody remarked how alike his girls were to their mother. Daughters should be like their mothers and Blythe and their girls were the most beautiful creatures in the Falls. He’d challenge anyone to say they weren’t. Of course, the same folks had said on occasion how Dill got his looks from Ted, but it was easy to tell the difference between true observation and politeness. Besides his dirty blond hair Dill had looked very little like him, Ted knew that. No matter what the heart wanted to be true, there was no disputing what his eyes told him every time he’d walked passed the photographs of Dillon hanging in the hall downstairs.

Blythe had taken herself off into the frozen garden and cried for an hour straight when he’d taken down the Son from the garage sign. He shouldn’t have climbed up there, yanking it away with his own hands, he realised that now. But he couldn’t bear seeing it any longer. It would be a lie to have left it up there, calling out an untruth to everyone passing by. The Fosters’ name would come to an end when the girls married, they all knew that. There were some people who’d known it before Ted had.

That same old hollowness began to yawn like a chasm inside him. The puppy squeaked for attention again but Ted was resolute. ‘You’ll have to wait, little one. I have something to do before breakfast.’ The bastard was good and dead now. No more a part of the town, no longer a thorn in their sides. And when Ted made it to the churchyard, by God, he hoped he’d find that the old son of a bitch had finally taken the last of his poorly kept goddamn secrets with him.

2nd November 2006

Alex felt him tense, harden like her clay; Finn’s whole body beside her suddenly off limits, no longer hers to touch.

‘That’s not it. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to know, Finn. I just can’t upset him again, he’s my dad. I’ve already put him through so much.’ Finn took his hand back, slow enough that it wasn’t like a punishment. Only it was. Alex stopped herself from grabbing it and bringing those fingers back to her again. ‘Now’s just … it’s not good timing, Jem’s getting into trouble at school and—’

‘So how long, Alex? I’m ready to get my lights punched out to stand up for the way I feel about you, how long until you’re ready to stand up for how you say you feel for me?’

Alex’s palm was still lying against Finn’s chest. Should she move it? Everything about him was starting to feel defensive. The way he was pushing his hair away from his face, the tension through his arms.

‘I do feel that way, Finn. I love you.’

‘Do you?’

She was losing him. She could already feel it. ‘You know I do. You’ve always known.’

‘So tell him. Tell him, Alex. Tell him we’re young and in love and we’d do anything to change what happened. But we can’t. All we can do is keep moving forwards and sometimes that means moving against the current.’

Something had shifted in the air between them. It was a similar feeling to watching one of her clay pots lose its shape when it had stood to be so beautiful before she’d cocked it up. Maybe if she was careful, deft enough, she could bring it back again, coax it all back into shape. ‘He’s my dad, Finn. I can’t keep pushing him. I love you, and I love him too. I need him to have the chance to understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘How sorry I am! It happened on our watch, Finn! I can’t be sorry for that and ram you down his throat at the same time. You know what he thinks we were doing!’

It was all coming flooding back. She didn’t want to go there right now. It would spoil everything, the candlelight, the snow outside. The taste of him still on her mouth. She was going to wear that taste away with these awful words.

Alex spoke quietly. ‘I just think we should keep things private, just for a while.’

‘Hide our relationship, you mean?’ Finn was not speaking quietly.

‘Not hide, just … take our time.’

Finn propped himself angrily against the headboard. ‘You want me to love you in secret, Alex? Hide how I feel, like I had to when my dad skipped out on my mum and me?’ Alex took her hand back. He couldn’t feel her now anyway. ‘That was no fun, Alex. Pretending I hated my own father because if I didn’t I’d be reminded of all the reasons why I should. I knew he hadn’t checked those brakes properly for your dad, I knew he’d rushed Mrs Fairbanks’ service to get to a shitty poker game, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone that I still loved him anyway because he was still my dad, or even how what he’d done to Millie Fairbanks and her mum wasn’t enough to stop me still wanting him home with us again.’

‘Finn …’ Alex felt herself shrink away in her too-small bed. Suddenly she felt totally, shamefully naked.

‘I know what my old man did, Alex. I know what he did to Millie, and your dad’s business and to my mum and me. But I still loved him. Only I had to do it in secret. I had to hide it.’ Finn shook his head. ‘I’m not signing up for that again, Alex. You don’t do that with love. You stand up for it and you take the blows and you bleed for it if you have to.’

‘I’m responsible, Finn. Don’t you get that? I lost Dill, I lost him! He was just a little boy, and I didn’t protect him. I stopped watching and I lost my baby brother. Their only son! I can’t just go home and—’

Finn’s eyes were greener with anger. His arms flailed wildly. ‘He died Alex! He didn’t get lost, Dill died! I had him in my arms, I could feel the knot in his lace, how I could free him!’ Finn’s body rippled with angry heartache. ‘But it was too tight. My fingers were too big and I couldn’t pull him from the root in time and he died. And you’re right. It was on our watch. But what can we possibly do that will ever make that better?’

Alex felt the hurt inside begin to twist into something resentful. ‘Not ram our happy-ever-after down his throat, Finn!’

Finn was suddenly up on his feet next to Alex’s books and their abandoned clothes, a naked ringmaster in the circus of Alex’s life. His arms were aloft again. ‘Fine! Well, what about all this? What are you going to do when you get a first with your degree, Alex? Because you will. You’ll graduate with flying colours and get the job you’ve always dreamed of in a career you’ll love. Then what?’

‘Finn.’

‘Let’s see, what about when you want to get married? Or buy your first house, or have your first kid. Are those things off limits for Ted Foster’s throat too? Or is it just me you can’t ram down it?’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’

‘No, you’re being ridiculous, Alex!’

‘No I’m not!’ She heard the tears in her voice. They were coming, they were en route. ‘Dill won’t get to do any of those things because of me.’

Finn pinned his hands on his hips and shook his head.

‘Don’t shake your head! Dill won’t ever bring a girlfriend home for my mum to cluck over, or help my dad out at the garage so he’s not breaking his back working on his own all the time. He’ll never grow up and have a laugh with Jem instead of only ever pissing her off! Dill won’t graduate, he won’t even flunk!’ Alex’s voice wobbled. It almost stopped her but the thought was too heavy to be left inside her head. ‘My brother will never go home to the Falls and tell my mum and dad that he’s met “the one”! The one person he can’t imagine living his life without because he knows there’ll never be anyone else who’ll ever come close! So how can I?’

Alex felt the first tears escape the corner of her eyes. She saw Finn relent, the tension slipping with an almost indecipherable dip of his shoulders. Gentle, calm Finn was trying to come back. ‘You’re right, Alex. Dill won’t get to do any of those things now. And I’d do anything to change it. To go back and stay right there on the riverbank, instead of messing around in the undergrowth where we couldn’t see. But we can’t change that now.’

Finn moved silently back to the bed but Alex looked away. He stopped short of reaching her.

‘I need my dad to know that I haven’t forgotten what I did, Finn. That I’ll never forget. Sorry just isn’t a big enough word,’ she said quietly.

Finn shook his head gently. ‘You’re right, Foster, it’s not. But you have a life to live. How are you going to do that if every achievement, every bit of happiness or fun you have, feels like an insult to Dill? Live half a life because he lost his? You can’t hide from your own life, Alex.’

CHAPTER 8

Ted moved quietly between the headstones, taking in the riot of discarded colour across this quiet little corner of St Cuthbert’s. Blythe would never have left Dillon’s grave in such disarray, not unless she really was as ill as he feared. No-one had tidied the mess of abandoned flowers because no-one else had been party to Blythe’s episode, as the docs kept calling it. No-one except for that damned Sinclair boy.

Ted bristled. The Sinclairs had a knack for lurking somewhere within the fallout zone of another family’s heartache. Ted made his way over to the granite stone next to the yellow blooms left scattered across the ground and checked that he was as alone as he liked to be here. If Blythe had been home this morning, he’d have given her a kiss and told her how he needed to get an early start at the garage before slipping away to this yearly ritual of his. To visit his boy the morning after his birthday, when the rest of them had already been and gone, just to be sure he wouldn’t be crossing paths with the wrong well-wisher. Year in year out, he’d given way to a person who had no goddamned right in this world to mourn his boy.

Ted regarded the abundance of flowers Blythe and Jem had arranged with care in the water pots. He tried not to examine Blythe’s reasons for coming back down here alone yesterday evening, tried not to feel so inadequate because of them. Ted looked over his shoulder again at his peaceful surroundings. The churchyard was no place for a mother, it was sure as hell no place for child. He wanted to break the silence, speak out the way other people could. Morning, son, he always wanted to say, sorry I don’t come by as often as your mother … But Ted wasn’t like Blythe. Once he was here, in the middle of all this quiet, he could never get the words out.

Ted crouched beside Dill’s headstone ignoring the immediate ache in his knee joints. It had been Jem’s idea, to have an image of an arrow etched into the granite. He’d hated the thought, he didn’t need reminding how Dill came to be reaching so far over the water, or that it was him who had given Dillon permission to keep that goddam bow set – him who was supposed to be showing Dill how to use it. But Jem had hardly spoken a word in the run up to the funeral and Blythe had forbidden him from saying anything to risk unsettling the girls any more than they already were.

‘Do you think it will be any easier for Alexandra? To be reminded of her mistake?’ Blythe had argued.

The Finn boy barged his way into Ted’s thoughts twisting something inside him on the way. Not now, Ted. He pinched at the tension building between his eyes. There was every chance Alexandra was going to turn up here in the Falls, he knew she would. Alexandra loved her mother too much to think up one of her endless reasons to stay away. But now wasn’t the time to pick at old wounds, not when Blythe’s needs were greatest.

Over on the church path, movement stole Ted from his thoughts. He watched the elderly couple and their little dog stop and take in the temporary wooden cross where the mayor had been buried back in January. That’s it, pay your respects to the pretentious bastard. Arrows or not, at least Dillon’s memorial was modest, befitting of a Foster. Not like the monstrosity the town was awaiting to be erected in the mayor’s honour once the earth had settled around his good-for-nothing carcass.

Ted reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a clean rag, running it over the letters engraved before him. Beloved son. Blythe and Jem had already cleaned and tidied Dillon’s plot yesterday morning of course, read and replaced the cards of the bouquets Helen Fairbanks and Susannah Finn still remembered to leave each year. Ted never read the cards, all that was between the women. They’d been good to Blythe over the years, long after she’d stopped singing with them and the rest of the choir girls, but only Helen Fairbanks had carried on coming up to the house. But that was your choice, Susannah. I never said you couldn’t come into our home, just not that boy of yours.

Ted felt that seasoned nip of guilt towards Susannah Finn. He thought of the way Susannah had stood in front of Finn while Ted had fought his rage. Ted promptly laid another thought over the top of the previous one as if laying salve over a stubborn cut that wouldn’t heal. Her boy had it coming.

Ted replaced the redundant cloth in his pocket and began gathering up the stems lying forgotten on the ground. He didn’t know much about flowers but he knew these ones had arrived after the rest or Blythe would’ve already had them neatly arranged in the water pots she and Jem had finished with yesterday morning. No, these had arrived later in the day. Fancy, expensive types ordered from one of those overpriced florists. Ted looked about himself for one of the fussy little miniature envelopes with the cards inside to reunite with them, but there was nothing. He tried to jolly through it but he’d already felt his back go cold. Of course there wasn’t a card. These were them, that one last anonymous bouquet that always turned up. Ted felt an instant rage burning up his neck. ‘Even now, you’ve got your filthy hands on my family, you son of a bitch.’ He’d been a fool to hope that this might be the year they finally stopped arriving.

Ted gathered up the last of the stems, a few at a time in big hands used to handling wrenches and jacks. Never a card. But then there were some who couldn’t find the words weren’t there? Could only ease their conscience by sending Dillon a hollow gesture before sodding back off to their own neat and tidy lives. Ted straightened up, trying to calm the resentment building in him but there was already a burning along his eyes. His voice was hoarse and metallic as the first tears tried to overcome him.

‘God damn you and your goddamned flowers,’ he growled under his breath.

Ted deftly eradicated the trail of moisture over his cheek with back of his wrist. The rage was instant. He knew he shouldn’t do it. He knew it was wrong. Knew that if there was a God in heaven who by chance might be glancing down upon him right now, right at this minute, then he was damned for sure.

Good men don’t do these things, he told himself, looking out across the churchyard to the plot of disturbed earth awaiting its monumental tribute to that charlatan. Mayor Sinclair, pillar of the community and all round nice guy. A good man, the Eilidh Mail had reported, if only there were more like him. Huh. The trouble with this town was that there were too many like him. People you thought you knew, trusted, right up until they nearly destroyed everything you held dear.

Ted’s stomach churned, the blooms suddenly heavy in his hands. Flowers were for conveying sentiment, what sentiment did these convey? Regret? Shame? Love? The anger was already flaring in his stomach; an ember he knew would never completely die away. He should have felt shame for what he was about to do, here in the middle of St Cuthbert’s churchyard at the grave of his boy. And maybe he did feel something like that, but it wasn’t enough to stop Ted from taking the heads of those pretty, expensive, anonymous flowers and crushing them right there in his hands.

CHAPTER 9

The song on the radio. The birds outside. The sun warm through her windscreen. The tinny sound of the truck speakers. She was distantly aware of it all melting away, the tiredness pulling her under.

‘Alex? Can we put an apple on Rodolfo’s head? I can hit it, I promise!’

Alex turned her face towards Dill’s voice. The sun felt warm on her skin. She wanted to hear it again, a voice she’d accidentally forgotten. Like the taste of flavour left behind in childhood.

‘I’m a good shot, Al, honest.’

She glanced back over her shoulder and saw Finn’s smile mirroring her own. Dill was beating a path to the riverbank, swishing at the grasses with his new bow. Mum had tried to confiscate it like his cracker-bombs, this unexpected early birthday present from the mayor, no less.

Finn reached out and ruffled Dill’s scruffy straw-coloured hair. ‘Let’s check your aim first, Dill Pickle.’

Alex watched the dimple at Dill’s cheek pucker and disappear as his mouth moved with each concentrated swish of his bow. His features were changing, maybe he would become more like their dad after all, the soft rounded edges of his little-boyhood just beginning their surrender to the harder lines of adolescence.

Dill looked at the dog then threw Alex an angelic look, eyes squinting over cheeks risen with mischief.

‘Don’t try that butter wouldn’t melt thing on me, Dill,’ Alex laughed, ‘I saw you in action earlier. I’d stay out of Jem’s way for a while if I were you.’

Finn laughed. ‘What have you done at your sister now, buddy?’ Finn had paint spatters all over his shirt. Or was that mud? No matter, he’d turned it inside out anyway. Rodolfo woofed and very sensibly fell back to trot beside Finn’s legs, before Dill could do a William Tell on him.

‘Nothin’.’ Dill grinned.

‘You big fibber, Dill Pickle,’ Alex said. ‘Y’know how I can always tell when you’re fibbing?’

‘His lips move?’ Finn teased.

‘No.’ Alex bumped Finn with her shoulder. She looked back to Dill. ‘Your dimple gives you away, little brother.’

Dill gave in immediately. ‘I caught Jem snogging the bathroom mirror! The actual mirror!’ His nose wrinkled. ‘Ew, she’s so gross, she looked like the fish me and Dad caught when we went fishing in the plunge pools.’ Dill made a face, presumably of a fish gasping its last. ‘I think she needs more practice. Yeeuck.’

‘Jem is spending a lot of time in the bathroom, come to think of it.’ Alex bit at the smile on her lips. Finn let his own smile run a merry riot all over his face. Something floated inside Alex when she saw him do that.

‘Know much about snogging do you, bud? What are you, nine?’

Dill stopped swishing and jabbed his bow towards Alex. ‘I know you like to snog my sister,’ he grinned, ‘and if my dad catches you guys on the porch again, he told Mum he’s going to see how much you really like her, Finn, and tell you all the gross stuff Alex—’

Alex lunged. ‘Dill! God, shut up!’

Dill bolted. Alex was going to throttle him. No wonder Mum had asked her to take Dill out while Jem cooled off. Jem had been set to murder him back at the house.

Alex made a grab for him. Incapacitating Dillon with relentless armpit-tickling was probably one of her favourite things to do, second only to snogging Finn’s face off on the front porch.

‘One sister trying to kill you not enough, huh, Dill?’

Dill squealed in that way smaller children do when they’re being chased and The Fear has gotten a hold of them. She’d nearly got to him, but they were both giggling too much to effectively chase or flee from the other. Alex made a final lunge when something cumbersome, a black and tan furred lump of warmth scuttled beneath her knees sending her reeling into the grasses with a clumsy thud. Rodolfo whimpered. Dill looked on for about half a second before erupting into the same breathless laughter he was holding onto from his toddlerhood.

Rodolfo whimpered again. Alex whimpered too. ‘Bad dog, Rodolfo.’ She lifted an arm up to examine it and grimaced.

‘Hold on, don’t move!’ Finn was beating back the thicket of nettles with Dill’s bow. He looked kinda clumsy about it, Alex thought, but it felt sort of romantic. Totally worth the stings.

‘Don’t, Finn, you’ll get stung too!’ Like she meant that.

Finn slipped an arm beneath her back. Alex let him. Finn lifted her out of the nettle patch. Alex breathed in a hit of his warm skin and the body spray she didn’t think suited him but said she liked just the same because he was Finn, marvellously gorgeous, artistic, Finn.

‘You’re not going to snog now, are you?’ Dill drew one of his arrows from their sheath and held it out to them feathers first. ‘Cos if you are, can one of you please shoot me first? Don’t bother with the apple.’

Alex jolted awake to a short, sharp, unpleasant sound at her truck window. Dill disappeared from her mind leaving behind him only a dull echo of the stinging sensation Alex had felt creeping through her legs. More tapping at the passenger window pushed away those last wisps of Finn too.

Alex blinked. Kerring General loomed in the near distance. She pieced it together, remembered her mum, Jem’s call, the journey home. Alex rubbed the tiredness from her head. Finn. On the roadside. That bit hadn’t been a trippy dream. Alex shifted a little and felt an uncomfortable fuzziness sear through one of her calf muscles. Her legs were locked together awkwardly in the foot well, a tingling sensation raging all the way down into her feet.

Pins and needles, loony. Not nettle-rash. She tried to flex against it.

‘I knew you wouldn’t wait until morning.’ The voice was dampened by glass. Alex checked for drool at the corner of her lips and tried to see around the hand softly rapping fingers adorned with pretty rings against her passenger window. Jem had been a sandy blonde last Christmas, sporting a victory roll if memory served. The girl standing the other side of the glass was all long layers and choppy fringe in a shade much closer to the deep red Blythe had passed on to both of them. Dill had taken more of their dad’s features, their mum had said. More angular and fair. But mostly he hadn’t reminded Alex of either of their parents in particular.

Alex smiled through the glass. It regularly caught her off-guard how attractive Jem had become since emerging from her tomboy chrysalis. Without Dill, Alex’s theory couldn’t be properly measured, but she’d long suspected theirs was one of those families where the children had become progressively more beautiful as they’d come along. This morning though, Jem looked even more the butterfly than usual, striking and fragile all at once.

Alex reached across the passenger seat and pulled on the door handle. ‘Hey, stranger. What time is it?’ The car park had filled up since Alex had pulled into one of the far bays and dozed off.

Jem crouched down in the truck doorway. ‘Time you stopped sleeping with your mouth open? It’s eight-thirty, how long have you been here? Or shouldn’t I ask?’ She reached lithely over the passenger seat and pulled Alex’s head in for a kiss. The question was on Jem’s face before she could ask it. ‘Alex, have you been swimming?’

‘Not exactly.’ She wouldn’t call it swimming. Alex gave in to another yawn. ‘I haven’t been here that long, I don’t think. Couple of hours?’

‘Hope not, Al. They’re hot on the parking charges here, the thieving toads. Like anyone wants to be stuck at a hospital.’ Alex pulled her pumps back and grabbed her rucksack from the passenger foot well while Jem slammed the passenger door shut. Alex skipped to keep pace with her, glancing across the hospital car park as they walked. There was no sign of him. Jem pulled an expensive looking phone from the breast pocket of her denim jacket and checked the screen. ‘He went in already. I hung back to make a call, I didn’t spot you until after he’d gone inside,’ she said reassuringly. Jem returned her phone to her pocket, slipping her free arm around Alex’s waist. ‘Honest, Al, don’t go off on one … he didn’t know you were here or he’d have waited to say hi.’

‘OK.’ Alex smiled, trying not to leave such a tiny word hanging in the air all by itself. What had she been expecting anyway, a greeting party?

Something mildly panicky was rising through Alex’s body the closer they got to the main hospital entrance. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t have the words, for her mum or her dad. How did you apologise for finally putting your own mother in hospital? For being the root cause of her broken heart?

Jem nudged Alex with her hip. ‘So what’s this? The beach bum look?’

Alex glanced down at the denim cut-offs and faded Jaws t-shirt she’d yanked on in the middle of the night as the espressos took effect. ‘It wasn’t exactly a deliberate outfit.’

‘Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water?’ Jem read. ‘Keeping the fear alive, are we?’

Alex let out one of those breathy laughs that wasn’t worth the effort seeing as it wasn’t going to fool anyone. That fear was well and truly alive and kicking, like a great white killer shark, if great white killer sharks had legs. ‘Feels like ages since I last saw you, Al.’ Jem’s voice fell lower. ‘How are you doing?’ It wasn’t a good sign when Jem was quiet. It was like her defence mechanism. As if not talking about a thing could make it disappear.

‘I’m good.’ Alex smiled. It wasn’t Jem’s job to check on her, Alex was the eldest. She missed her role. ‘How are you doing, Jem?’ she countered, pulling Jem in to her a little as they walked past A&E. It was always a strange sensation Alex felt when they got together, as if it was possible to miss a person even more when they were within reach.

‘I’m OK. I’m just glad I was already up here and not still in London when Mal called. It was a bit of a shock, Alex. She didn’t look great last night. She didn’t look … like Mum.’ Alex’s throat narrowed as they crossed the hospital lobby. She should’ve done more to stop this from happening, somehow, instead of hiding from them all.

Jem reached for the lift button then stopped suddenly, as if something had just short-circuited in her head. She placed her hand flatly against the wall and held herself there.

‘She has to be OK, Alex,’ Jem said quietly. ‘I’m not ready for her not to be around yet.’

Alex hung back. She swallowed her own thoughts and tried for upbeat, being the big sister. ‘You think Mum’s gonna check out before she’s seen one of us walk down the aisle, Jem? Unlikely.’ Blythe had made endless references to the great altar race over the years. ‘Course she’ll be OK. Like you said, tough as Dad’s old boots.’ But Alex felt as if someone had just kicked her in the neck with one.

A cycle of what ifs began circuiting Alex’s head. What if she’d have come home this weekend, just for once? What if she’d have been with Blythe in the churchyard? What if that could have made the difference?

Alex stopped herself. There was only one what if that could’ve ever made the difference and they all knew it.

What if I hadn’t followed Finn into the bushes?

CHAPTER 10

The Acute Assessment Unit was quiet. No drama. No urgency. Jem announced herself at the intercom. The doors onto the AAU opened. Alex followed quietly as Jem gave the nurses stationed at the central desk a salutatory smile and headed for the second side room on the left. Their roles were already set – Jem, the daughter who knew her way around, what to do, where to go – and Alex, the bumbling visitor.

Alex rubbed at the back of her neck. It was impossible not to feel anxious at what lay on the other side of the door in front of them. This awful ominous build up smacked of one of the games she’d watched last night on Takeshi’s Castle, the maze game with its skittish contestants where the only difference between salvation and some unknown horror was a couple of inches of plywood. And what’s behind door number two? A scary Japanese monster? An emotionally estranged father? An unrecognisable mother.

Alex eyed the door as Jem reached to push on it and felt an unpleasant lightness in her stomach. She could have taken a running jump, like the nervy lunatics on Takeshi, but Jem was already a confident step ahead, silently slipping through the door.

The smell was subtle as it hit. Alex shuffled quietly across the threshold, the scent as familiar as a favourite winter coat. She readied herself. She always readied herself.

‘Hello, Dad.’

Ted was standing, grey and monolithic, beside the only chair in the room. Alex lunged clumsily at him for their obligatory kiss. Ted turned from where he’d been watching her mum sleeping to receive Alex’s kiss. They bumped jaws awkwardly. His skin felt rough, bristly with the greying beard that wasn’t hanging onto the last of its blond quite as well as the rest of his hair. Alex gave him his personal space back and tried to remember the last time they’d made physical contact for anything other than this awkward hello–goodbye ritual of theirs. The last time she’d hung onto his arm or pecked him on the cheek for no particular reason.

‘I spotted her in the car park. She still snores like you, Dad, mouth wide open and everything,’ Jem chirped, filling the void with warmth before anything cooler could creep in there. Ted rewarded her with a lazy smile. Alex wished she could think of something to say of equal worth. Nothing came. She shuffled back to the bottom of her mum’s bed, away from that distinctly subtle cocktail of her father’s – coffee, morning tobacco, the last engine oil her mother’s flowery detergent could never quite purge from his overalls.

‘You shouldn’t have driven through the night, Alexandra. Folks fall asleep at the wheel all the time,’ he said softly. He gave Alex a few more seconds’ eye contact before his attention returned to her mum. Alex watched his huge gnarly hands move gently over her mum’s hair. It looked redder against the stark white of the pillow. Jem was right. She didn’t look like their mum. Not sick, at least, but older. Different. Fallible.

‘Is she …?’ Alex tried past the lump forming in her throat.

‘Your mother’s just sleeping. She’ll be right as rain once she’s had a good sleep, slowed down for five damned minutes.’ He was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, he did this when something was niggling at him and he couldn’t light a cigarette.

Alex looked at the stranger in the bed. She’d never seen her sleeping like that, straight as an ironing board, sheets neatly tucked beneath her arms. It was all over if anything happened to her. Blythe was the thread holding their patchwork family together. It would all unravel without her.

‘Did she like the sunflowers?’ Alex heard her own voice.

Alex saw her dad’s forefinger begin back and forth against his thumb again only with more intent though now, as if trying to eradicate a sharp little irritant that kept finding its way back under his skin. Alex wished she hadn’t asked.

‘I, er … I know purple is mum’s favourite colour but the yellow …’ But the yellow was for you, Dad. Please don’t clench your jaw. He did it again. Jem saw it too and tried to pretend she hadn’t, which only made it a hundred times worse. ‘The yellow looked nicer against the thistles I thought …’ Alex was already floundering. Ted winced and she knew then that she’d already said something wrong.

‘Please, can we not talk about goddamn flowers? Just for five minutes? What the hell difference do flowers make anyway? Your mother wouldn’t have even been down there if she wasn’t having to cart the bloody things around.’

Alex felt herself recoil. Had her flowers arrived late? Was that why Blythe had gone back to the churchyard? Was it Alex’s fault Blythe had gone back there alone?

‘Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean …’ She didn’t know what she meant. Stupid girl.

Ted’s hand opened out where he’d been rigidly holding it at his side. Alex wasn’t sure if it was to placate her or to silently implore her to just. Shut. Up. Why didn’t she ever have anything better to offer them?

Jem caught Alex’s eye. ‘We’ll go and get the coffees, Dad. We don’t want to overwhelm Mum when she wakes up, all cooped up in here together.’

Jem waited for the door to swing closed behind them before she spoke.

‘He’s tired, Alex. He didn’t get much sleep last night.’

‘It’s fine, really,’

‘Alex,’ Jem’s hand was already on Alex’s forearm, ‘the flowers, that wasn’t a dig at you back in there. It was my fault, I was doing his head in on the ride here, I was going on about these evening flowers mum got so upset about. He’d already had his fill before we got here this morning. Honestly, Al, it was just bad timing, that’s all. Don’t be so quick to take it to heart, OK? He’s tired.’

Alex tried to relax her shoulders, let some of the tension slope away. ‘What evening flowers?’

‘Pass. That was what I was trying to work out with Dad in the car, until he bit my head off. Something Mum was talking about when Mal first got her into A&E. No-one could really understand what she was saying though.’

‘Oh. I didn’t know about that.’ Alex tried not to feel out of the loop. ‘Did Mal know what they are?’

Jem shrugged. ‘I didn’t think to ask Mal about it, actually. The nurse said it was all part of it, Mum being confused.’ Jem rubbed her eyes as if she hadn’t slept much last night either. ‘Flowers that arrived in the evening, I guess.’

Evening flowers. No-one else had flowers delivered, it had to have been Alex’s bouquet that had arrived late. Great. No wonder Ted was so pissed off with her already.

‘What are you thinking?’ Jem was studying her. Big tired blue eyes glancing out through the breaks in her fringe.

‘Nothing.’ Alex smiled, but it didn’t reach her cheeks. She’d used one of the big flashy online department stores that offered astronomically priced ‘botanical giftware’. Never again. What good were flowers that didn’t arrive until the evening?

‘Come on, Al. I need caffeine.’

Jem began to walk off but Alex could feel she was onto something. ‘They were my flowers, weren’t they? That Mum had to go back for.’

Jem looked puzzled. ‘Yours the ones with no card?’

Alex nodded. She never sent a card.

‘Sunflowers and thistles?’ Alex nodded again. ‘Then I’m sorry, sis, but as much as I know you like to be the bad guy and all, you can’t take this one for the team. I signed for your bouquet after breakfast.’ Jem squeezed Alex’s arm. ‘I don’t know why Mum went back down there alone, Al, but whatever her reason was, it wasn’t your flowers.’ Jem turned on her heels. ‘Come on, I’ll show you around.’

‘I don’t want to go for coffee, Jem.’ Alex called after her, ‘I want to be here on the ward, when she wakes up.’

‘Me too,’ Jem reassured. ‘There’s a family room just through here. We won’t be far.’ Jem began to edge along the corridor again but Alex stayed glued to the spot. She hadn’t come this far to hide out again. If her dad needed to sound off at someone then she could at least provide that for him.

Jem looked at her expectantly. Alex folded her arms and looked at her own feet like a stubborn child who didn’t want to go to school. ‘What did Malcolm Sinclair say, Jem? What happened in the churchyard? Has Mum been ill this weekend? I need to know what you and Dad know, Jem.’ Alex was already picturing it again. Her mum collapsed in the cemetery overcome with the sadness of another birthday denied to Dillon. The utter needlessness of so many years without him, and not even the luxury of someone to hate for it.

Jem retraced her steps back to Alex and let out a long sigh. Jem was being patient. It was gift she rarely shared with anyone else. She leant against the wall beside Alex.

‘Malcolm had to carry her in. He said Mum was agitated. She was mumbling about these bloody flowers,’ Jem shrugged, ‘The evening flowers! The evening flowers! Something like that. She was still pretty worked up when me and Dad got here.’

‘About flowers? Well, who normally sends flowers for Dill?’

‘Nobody, really. Us, Helen Fairbanks always does. Susannah Finn too.’ Finn’s mum had never stopped being kind to them, even Alex. After everything Finn had put up with because of her.

Finn was there in her head again. ‘Anyone else?’ Alex pressed.

‘Alex, hate to break it to you but I don’t actually have all the answers.’ Jem’s patience was starting to wear off. ‘There probably weren’t any evening flowers, Mum was very confused. What does it matter?’

‘It matters if it’s enough to upset Dad like that. I’ve only been here five minutes and I’ve already annoyed him.’

Jem looked at Alex and sighed again. ‘I’ve already told you, Al. He sounded off at me earlier too. I only asked if he thought we should go back to the church today in case anyone had dropped more flowers off for Dill and they needed tidying. He blew at that, too. He’s worried, and probably shattered. I know he didn’t sleep well, he went for a walk at 5.30 this morning for crying out loud. Probably chain-smoking.’

Alex nodded. That would be the next thing. Their dad was going to get lung cancer off the back of all the worrying he’d had to do. Alex was going to wipe them all out eventually while she was bound to live a long and healthy life with bags of time to think about how she’d set this nasty little trail of dominoes up.

A familiar knot tightened in Alex’s stomach. Her mum’s grief must be unbearable. People didn’t get over the loss of their children; it was a universal truth.

The question fell from Alex’s mouth. ‘What if it wasn’t a stroke?’

‘What do you mean?’

Surely it was their mum’s heart that had finally had enough. ‘Are they sure it wasn’t her heart, Jem?’

‘It was a stroke Alex. Not a heart attack.’

‘But what did Mal see?’

Jem shook her head and huffed. ‘Mal was … a bit sketchy actually. He said Mum looked unwell. I think he saw her in the churchyard and just went over to say hello, I guess.’

‘Did she look upset? Did he think Mum had been crying?’

‘What? No, I don’t think so. Alex, you’re as bad as Dad.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘With the random questions! Dad practically interrogated Mal last night, What have you said to my wife? Are you responsible for this, Sinclair?’ Jem solemnly tucked her hair behind one ear and shook her head. ‘You should’ve heard him. Dad was really horrible to Mal, actually.’

‘Dad thought Malcolm had upset Mum?’

‘Apparently. I tried to tell him. Mal Sinclair couldn’t upset himself. Mal’s just like his dad was.’ Jem had been fond of Mal, once upon a time, and the mayor.

‘Sorry, Jem. I should’ve been here.’ Alex shrank back against the corridor wall.

‘Dad wanted to know what they’d been talking about. Mal said they hadn’t had a chance to talk about anything except the fluttering she was having and …’

‘Fluttering? Again? Jem, why didn’t you say that?’ Alex knew it would be her heart. ‘We need to tell the doctors, before it happens again!’ It was a miracle they hadn’t done her in before now, the fluttery palpitations her mum habitually played down since their sudden onset a decade ago.

One of the nurses at the desk was looking over at them. Jem blew her fringe from her eyes again. ‘I’m going to need coffee if we’re getting into all this, Al. It wasn’t her heart, OK? Will you please listen to me? If the fluttering business had bothered her that much, she’d have seen somebody about it before now.’

‘Do you really believe that, Jem?’

Blythe liked to make light of it. It was like a butterfly trapped in ajar that was all. You didn’t trouble the doctor over a butterfly heart. A stampeding herd of wildebeest in there, fair enough, but not butterflies.

Jem smiled sweetly down the corridor towards the nurses’ station. Alex slumped back against the wall next to her mother’s room. Whatever it was that was in her mother’s heart, wildebeest or butterflies, Alex knew why they were in there. Alex was staring at her shoes again when Jem gently kicked her own foot against Alex’s.

‘It was a stroke, Alex. Nothing anyone could’ve foreseen. Nothing anyone else is responsible for. Let it go.’

The door into Blythe’s room swept open. He might’ve looked older, but Ted was still a mountain of a man, tall and broad and handsome, as fathers should be.

Alex stood a little straighter. Her dad came to stand in front of her and scratched softly at the flop of grey-blond hair over his eyes.

‘I shouldn’t have snapped at you just now, Alex. I’m just a, er, a little …’ Alex watched him try to choose his words.

‘It’s OK, Dad.’

Ted managed a brief smile. Jem’s eyes bounced back and forth as if she were spectating at Wimbledon.

‘I didn’t think you’d wait to drive up here to your mother, you should’ve come to the house,’ he said. ‘I waited for you on the porch.’ He would’ve waited there longer for her too, had he not started thinking the same old thoughts, tying himself in knots until he’d found himself stalking angrily down to St Cuthbert’s.

‘It was early. I didn’t know if you’d be awake …’ But she knew it was a rubbish lie before she told it.

‘You’re my daughter. And it’s never too early in the day to see your child arrive safely home, Alexandra.’

CHAPTER 11

‘Jem? Are you hungry yet? I think we should wait until Dad gets home. Shall one of us call him?’

Alex’s voice bounced up through the house as she sniffed the contents of the heavy casserole dish on the kitchen table. How Helen Fairbanks had managed to hoist all that cast iron and lamb hotpot up to the house and leave it on the porch deck without putting her back out was an enigma, but Mrs Fairbanks was one of those practical can-do women, cut from the same old-school cloth as Blythe and Susannah Finn. ‘Jem?’ Alex yelled again. Jem had regressed back to her early teens since they’d got back to the house. She’d been upstairs on the other side of a closed bedroom door while Alex had skulked around the kitchen in quiet contemplation. Someone had to keep the new puppy from chewing or piddling on anything else and Jem still seemed immune to all things cute and cuddly. Alex meandered back out from the hall. Their parents’ kitchen was still homely and vast as any of the other farmhouse kitchens along the track, it still smelled of the dried lavender Blythe had tied to the beams and the ashes in the Aga, despite the new addition to the household peeing with excitement every time Alex walked into the room.

Alex’s stomach growled. Helen Fairbanks’ mercy meals were legendary. Over by the log basket a bundle of fur the colour of wheat fields heard the noises of Alex’s gastric processes and began wagging herself to death again. The pup waddled excitedly towards Alex, a wet trail in her wake. ‘Agh, not again!’ Alex groaned. ‘You’re like a tap … dog.’ The dog needed a name. Alex seemed to be the object of its unwavering affection and if they were going to have this intimate relationship of ankle-licking and wee-clearing every time the thing set eyes on her, the dog definitely needed a name.

Alex listened to the bump bump bump of Jem finally plodding down the wooden stairs. Jem bobbed lethargically back into the kitchen, her hair tied up now like the renegade ballerina she’d briefly been in her childhood. Alex had only just shook her own out, her scalp was still throbbing from having had its hair follicles pulled back too vigorously, too carelessly in the rush to make the drive up here.

‘You cut your hair,’ Jem observed, reaching for the auburn tendrils sitting against Alex’s shoulders. Alex finished placing a knife and fork aside the last of the three placemats their mum had already set out for Jem’s weekend stay.

‘Yeah. Think I should’ve just hacked the lot off though. I have to keep it tied back all the time at work, so …’ Not to mention the swimming issue. It only took a few strands to break free and start floating around her face to freak her out completely.

‘Looks nice, anyway. You look like Mum did, in that photo she used to have of her and Dad.’ Alex frowned. ‘At the mayor’s annual dinner.’

Alex fished for the memory. ‘Oh, yeah. The one with Mayor Sinclair letting Dad wear his gold BA Baracas chains. I haven’t seen that picture for years.’ She smiled. It was one of her dad’s favourites. He used to tell everyone how he’d fallen in love with their mum all over again that night, she looked so beautiful. Like Grace Kelly. Grandma Ros had insisted that picture be kept in the hallway where visitors would definitely see it, having your photo taken with the mayor and his wife was a badge of honour too shiny to be left in a back room.

Jem moved lethargically over to her chair. Her mood seemed to have been on a steady decline since their debate on who should to call Mal for a proper chat about what had happened last night. Alex was probably just over-scrutinising again. Finn had accused her of that the night he’d showed up at her university digs, of looking for a problem until she found one.

An image of Finn, chest heaving with the rigours of his morning run poked Alex in her mind’s eye again. This morning was a fluke, it didn’t mean they would keep bumping into each other, not necessarily. Even if they did, a simple hello would suffice. Just a nice, polite hello, like old friends. They weren’t kids any more, were they?

‘Neither have I actually.’

‘What?’

‘Seen that photo of Mum and Dad and the Sinclairs. Can’t say I miss not seeing Louisa’s sour face every time I come into the house though,’ Jem said. ‘You know, she called me a thief once. Said I’d stolen one of the ornaments from Sinclair Heights. Like I’d want anything out of the mayoral mansion.’

Mal hadn’t grown up in a mansion, but he’d been the most well kitted-out kid Alex and Jem had ever played with. Ted had said they were the perks of being an only child. Mal had told them over toasted marshmallows one night that his dad really wanted Mal to have a brother but Louisa said no because she detested being fat.

‘Ornaments?’

‘Yeah, that miniature Viking ship, of Dill’s remember? I was showing it to Mal, he had one similar and was trying to tell me how valuable his was because it had these markings on the bottom.’ Jem’s face twisted as she recalled the tale. ‘Then Louisa saw me showing Dill’s ship to Mal and freaked. Said I was trying to steal it, that it belonged to a set of theirs Malcolm’s father keeps in his private study.’ Jem imitated Louisa’s acerbic voice. ‘She told me it was about time I stopped acting like a little thug and how coming from a family with no money was no excuse.’

Alex whistled. ‘That’ll do it.’

‘Oh yeah, she also said I should start behaving like a “lady”.’ Jem held her fingers up to denote inverted commas. ‘Starting with rectifying my boy’s haircut.’

Alex bit at her lip. She felt for Jem, everyone knew Mal’s mum was a tyrant. Alex had been lucky on the ‘boyfriend’s mothers’ score, Susannah Finn had treated Alex like a daughter, virtually.

‘To be fair, you were always a bit thuggish, Jem. But you never looked like a boy … not once your crew cut grew out a bit, anyway.’ Alex smiled, trying for a little light relief at the expense of Jem’s historic rash makeover choices. I just wanted a change, had been Jem’s official line when the head had sent her home. Alex had made a few of her own dodgy fashion statements in her teens but only Jem had ever come home from school with a short back and sides.

Jem wasn’t listening; she was too busy looking blankly at her mobile phone.

‘So who won?’ Alex asked, straightening the place settings. Her mum always laid the table so elegantly, an art form with its own choreography.

‘Won what?’

‘The battle of the Viking ship?’

Jem winked. ‘There was no way she was keeping that little carved ship. It’s in Dill’s room now, go and have a look.’

Alex caught her smile before it dropped. She didn’t go in there. Mum had kept it nice, unchanged. Everything in its place like her finely laid table settings. Alex didn’t even want to risk moving the dust in Dill’s room.

‘I believe you, Jem. How’d you get it back off her?’

Jem grimaced at her phone and slapped it onto the table, slumping into one of the chunky wooden chairs. ‘Louisa? I’d have prised it from her bony fingers if I’d have had to, Al. As it happened, Mal’s dad came home. You should’ve seen Louisa’s face when the mayor told her she’d made a mistake. Nearly killed her handing it back, you’d have thought she was handing me Mal’s inheritance. Anyway …’ Jem wriggled herself more upright in her seat, ‘your room’s all sorted, Mum and I already changed all the bedclothes yesterday.’

‘Thanks, Jem.’

‘No worries.’ Jem lifted her phone again, twisting it in an attempt to find a gobbet of phone signal somewhere over the tablecloth. She huffed and stood up again. ‘I could do with a drink. There must be a bottle of Pinot here somewhere.’

There wasn’t, Ted was teetotal now. Blythe didn’t keep a drop in the house any more, Jem knew that just as well as Alex.

‘Are you OK, Jem? You seem preoccupied?’

‘Hmm? Sorry. It’s just work, being difficult.’ Jem’s phone had been bleeping all afternoon, until they’d driven back into dodgy mobile signal territory and the bleeping had died a death.

‘Is that who you were on the phone to?’ Alex asked. Jem had been up there for over an hour. ‘You haven’t given your work the house number have you, Jem? You’ve said it before, they don’t exactly respect your work–life balance.’

‘Ha! Nope, those lines have definitely been blurred.’

Alex felt a pang of territorialism. Jem was needed here, her swanky jewellery company could sod off.

‘Can’t they cope on their own for a while?’ Dan would never bother Alex here. He’d already insisted she take all the time she needed from the food bank. Jem came back to the table, examining the base of her glass. She poured the water Alex had set out and hovered. ‘George is under a lot of pressure, Alex. We have a huge opportunity coming up. There’s a lot to get through.’

‘Who’s George? Your boss? Or just the bloke tasked with tracking you down to Mum’s bedroom phone?’ Alex felt her eyebrow rise like her dad’s would whenever he used to catch them on his bedroom phone.

Jem looked guilty. She set the water jug back down and braced herself on the back of the chair. ‘George can be … difficult. Thinks everything is always so simple … black and white,’ she muttered, sliding back into her seat.

‘How nice for George.’

Jem obviously didn’t want to get into it. ‘Did you call me before?’

‘I wanted to know if you were ready to eat? Or do you think Dad might leave the hospital soon?’ Alex pulled the lid away from Mrs Fairbanks’ pot and beheld six fat juicy dumplings proudly peeping from a puddle of rich gravy. Saliva rushed into her mouth. She never ate like this any more. Casserole for one? Unlikely.

‘That was Dad on the phone just then.’

‘Still nothing?’ Alex asked. It had only been an hour and a half since they’d left them at Kerring General, Ted still pacing, Blythe still sleeping. Soundly they all hoped.

‘Nope. I told Dad to go and get a paper, have a smoke or something, not that I want to encourage his bad habits. I think the nurses are wearing him down though. They’ve promised to call him if there’s any change, he was just mulling over leaving.’

‘We’ll wait then. He must be starving.’ Alex clamped the lid back onto the pot, her stomach grumbled again in protest.

Jem nodded at Alex’s tee. ‘I don’t think Jaws is willing to wait. Come on, dish up. I’ll put Dad’s in the oven.

Alex was still weighing it up when a ladleful of food fell onto the plate in front of her.

Alex bit into a tender piece of hot lamb and nearly slipped taste bud first into a state of euphoria. ‘Bloody hell, Mal Sinclair got lucky marrying Millie! I wonder if she can cook like her mum.’

Jem smiled disinterestedly. ‘Who knows? Probably. Millie’s probably perfect wife material, she’d have to be to get the green light from Louisa Sinclair just to spend time with her little Malcy, let alone marry him.’

Alex detected a nip in the air. She wasn’t completely convinced it didn’t smell of sour grapes. Nothing drove a wedge like an old boyfriend. Jem had never admitted to it but their mum had seen her and Mal ‘in a tryst’ outside Frobisher’s Tea Rooms in town once. Blythe had called Alex up at university specifically to tap her for inside knowledge.

‘I thought you and Millie used to be good friends?’

‘Years ago, maybe.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you see her much?’ Alex asked with a mouthful. ‘When you’re home? Don’t tell me she’s still gorgeous and slender, not with food like this firing out of her mum’s kitchen?’ Millie Fairbanks had always reminded Alex of Sandra Dee on Grease. Prim and lovely, and only a pair of black satin trousers away from total sex-goddessdom.

‘Not really.’

‘Not really what? Not really gorgeous or not really, you don’t see her much?’

‘I don’t see Millie.’

Jem yanked a slice of bread in two. Alex silently chewed a piece of swede. ‘That’s too bad. I always liked Millie.’

‘A few ballet classes doesn’t make you besties, Alex. Anyway, she was pallier with Carrie in the end.’

Alex took another bite of food. It was probably best not to get into it. She’d eaten four melt-in-the-mouth potato morsels before Jem spoke again. ‘Did you know they have a kid now?’

Alex backtracked her thoughts but couldn’t find where they’d left off. ‘Who?’

‘Mal and Millie.’ Jem laughed under her breath. ‘They even sound like they should be a couple.’

‘Oh, yeah. I think I heard something. A boy?’

‘Alfie. He’s four. Looks just like his dad did at his age, apparently.’

‘Oh.’

‘But I hear he has Millie’s dark eyes, not blue like Mal’s.’

‘I see.’

Jem nodded wistfully. ‘Helen spent nearly the whole time I was at the mayor’s funeral walking me through all of her grandson’s milestones. It was lucky she’d taken her funeral handbag and not her everyday handbag or I’d have been looking through albums of the things, I reckon.’

‘You went to the mayor’s funeral?’

‘Sure. He was always nice to me when I hung out at Mal’s house, unlike his serpentine wife. I really liked him. Didn’t you?’

‘I guess. I never really saw much of him after Mum finished helping him at the library.’

Jem shrugged. ‘I liked him. He always asked me stuff about Dill, as if he thought it was important to keep talking about him or something. Anyway, someone had to go. The Fosters and Sinclairs go way back. Everyone knows …’

‘The Fosters and Sinclairs have the longest bloodlines in these parts,’ they both said in unison. Jem grinned. She had a brilliant grin. Infectious, Alex always caught it.

‘Good old Mum. The genealogical guru of Eilidh Town Hall.’ Everyone wanted to be of Viking descent in Eilidh Falls, the mayor had been no exception. ‘So the mayor wasn’t cast adrift on a burning pyre then?’ Alex teased.

‘No pyre.’ Jem smiled.

‘Why didn’t Mum and Dad go?’ Blythe and Ted had moved in the same social circles as the Sinclairs once, until Helen and Millie Fairbanks’ car had collided with a wagon at the bottom of the bridge on Eilidh high street, just after it had left a service at Foster & Son’s Autos.

‘Not sure, it was weird. They both had this mystery bug they didn’t want to pass on. So I went on my own.’

Jem reached for more water. Something pretty caught Alex’s eye. ‘Jem! Your bracelet! Did your company make that?’

‘Ah, just a little something I knocked up.’ Jem said modestly.

‘It’s beautiful, Jem,’ Alex admired, running a finger over the edge of the bracelet. ‘I bet you’ve sold a few of these.’ Pottery had been Alex’s bag. She’d been all set to become the next Emma Bridgewater.

‘I wish. I’ve only made two, they’re such a bugger to make. I do love them though. They’re my best pieces.’

‘Have you seen Wedding Wars?’

‘Wedding Wars?’

OK, so Alex probably needed to rein in the late night telly watching. ‘Jem, I’m telling you, you should go into the bridal market. You’d make a fortune.’

‘And deal with all those finicky bridezillas or, worse, their mums? No thanks. They’re not all as chilled out as Blythe, you know. Just ask Mal.’ Jem stabbed at a piece of carrot then thought better of eating it. ‘I wonder when her next meal will be.’

Alex had stopped eating too. She pushed a slice of potato around her plate. She’d been hasty, hopeful this morning of her mum waking up and them bringing her home in no time. Then they’d come in to change Blythe’s catheter and Alex realised. Blythe wasn’t just sleeping, she was dependent. For now, at least.

Alex sat perfectly still, listening to the clinking of Jem’s cutlery against her plate and a houseful of silence behind it. ‘She needs to come home, Jem. It’s too quiet.’

‘She will. This place will be jumping again once she’s home.’ But they both knew that it probably wouldn’t. It had been years since either of them had heard the sounds of their childhood. Years since Blythe’s voice had effortlessly chased the rising and falling of dramatic melodies while Madama Butterfly or La Traviata played through the house. When Blythe did eventually come home it would just be more obvious. Dill had taken all the noise with him.

12th September 2004

‘You’re lying.’ Ted’s voice sounded thin against the cheery 20s jazz playing out in Frobisher’s Tea Rooms.

Louisa’s hand was trembling. Her glass lying upended on the table-top. She wiped at the lipstick smeared messily from her lips. Ted saw the tears pooling in her eyes and felt nothing. He might have worried that he’d hurt her, been too rough, if he could think straight.

Louisa’s eyes darted about the tea rooms but the waitresses wouldn’t see them sitting here. Louisa had chosen the booth, tucked away by the little side window.

She swallowed back angry tears. ‘But you know that I’m not, don’t you, Ted? I can see it in your face.’

He should never have come here. Then he wouldn’t have had to listen to her spiteful proposition, wouldn’t have had to push her away. Wouldn’t have made her want to hurt him back so cruelly.

‘Stop talking, Louisa. Just …’

He brought his sleeve over his own mouth, in case any of that red was left on his. His hands were shaking too. Ted rose slowly from his chair. Louisa’s eyes grew wide.

‘Where are you going? You can’t just leave.’

He should never have come. ‘Home, Louisa. To my family. I promised my son we’d play with his new arrows.’ The bow and arrows. Ted pictured Malcolm bringing them over to the house for Dillon. He felt himself hunch over the table for a moment, his fingers grasp the edge of the table-top.

Louisa’s chin wobbled. She held herself rigid and glared up at him. ‘You go back to her then,’ she spat. ‘To that frumpy little wife of yours. But I hope you’re good at pretending, Edward Foster.’

CHAPTER 12

‘Every case is different, Mr Foster. It’s still very early days and there’s no saying how your wife’s symptoms will continue to present. I’m afraid it can be something of a guessing game in the initial weeks.’

Alex could tell her dad was trying to decipher how old this man delivering the fate of their family could possibly be. For a moment she found herself playing along. Dr Okafor was handsome in that way all young, intelligent here-to-help-your-suffering-loved-one people were, with his rectangular-rimmed glasses and candy-pink shirt that was only ever going to be OK on an acute assessment unit because he was educated, and knowledgeable, and because it complemented his flawless black skin perfectly.

Alex glanced at Jem to see if she was evaluating Dr Okafor too. Jem’s hand was resting comfortably through the crook of their dad’s arm. ‘You’re saying she might be in hospital for weeks? Even though she’s woken up and managed to drink and …’

Dr Okafor lifted his hands apologetically. ‘We are very encouraged by your mother’s progress this morning, Miss Foster, but before you go in to see her you must be made aware that recovery can be unpredictable and sometimes erratic. As the swelling on Mrs Foster’s brain reduces, we would hope to see further changes in the rate of her progress but it can be a very … disorientating experience for your mother.’

Alex found her voice. ‘So what are you saying, Doctor?’

He looked softly at Alex, as if delivery was something they spent a whole semester’s study on in med school. ‘It is quite possible that your mother’s symptoms could get worse before she starts to feel better, and that is something we should keep in mind. Did you know that your wife suffers from arrhythmia, Mr Foster?’

Bingo. Dr Okafor had just delivered a body blow. It didn’t matter how much older and wiser Ted was, this guy, this kid, knew stuff. Important stuff that he didn’t. About his Blythe. ‘Arrhythmia?’ Jem ventured.

‘It’s her heart, Jem.’ Alex’s voice snagged, unready to speak when she’d wanted it to.

Dr Okafor smiled and dipped his head. ‘That’s correct. Arrhythmia is essentially irregular beating of the heart, its rhythm. Sometimes this can be the cause of the stroke, sometimes the effect. Has your wife ever complained of problems in this area, Mr Foster? Any discomfort, breathlessness, palpitations … maybe no more than a fluttering sensation?’

Alex felt her neck burning up. I did this to her. She knew it. She’d known it since she put down the phone to Jem in the cubicle at the leisure centre.

Alex heard her dad clear his throat. He wasn’t going to be caught out by a snagging voice, his age and experience at least gave him that much. ‘My wife’s a busy woman, Doctor. It takes a lot to slow her down. If Blythe has had any problems with her heart,’ he cleared his throat again, ‘she hasn’t shared them with me.’ Alex couldn’t read her dad’s expression. Her mum wouldn’t have kept that from him, would she? Her parents didn’t keep anything from each other, they didn’t have secrets, they just weren’t the sort.

Ted battled on. ‘Would she have had these palpitations all the time, Doctor? Or could they be triggered by something?’

Jem looked just as surprised by Ted’s obliviousness. Alex frowned. Why hadn’t her mum shared this with him? She deserved his support, why forfeit that and hide a fluttering sodding time-bomb, waiting to go off in St Cuthbert’s churchyard?

‘The symptoms might have been present day to day, Mr Foster,’ said Doctor Okafor, ‘or just here and there for no particular reason. There can be triggers. Stress, for example, can be a factor. There are many aspects we should consider.’

The burning in Alex’s neck was sweeping up through her head. Stress can be a factor. Stress. Define stress, Doctor. How about, say, the drowning of your only son? The years robbed of celebrating his birthdays like a normal family. The thought of him gasping his last desperate breaths while the daughter you’d entrusted him to was making goo-goo eyes at her boyfriend in the bushes. Would that be an aspect worth considering? Would that affect the rhythm of a mother’s heart?

Jem was looking over. In through the nose, out through the mouth … Alex could feel her heart thudding in her chest. Was arrhythmia contagious? Like an infectious yawn, jumping from one person to the next? She hoped so. She deserved it, she bloody well deserved it.

A bleep began pulling Alex from the internal disaster gathering pace inside her ribcage.

‘I’m terribly sorry. Would you excuse me? I’ll come and find you all again as soon as I’m back on the ward,’ Dr Okafor said apologetically.

Ted offered the doctor his hand, his acceptance of the younger man’s competence – his gratitude for it. Somewhere on the periphery, Alex heard Jem utter her thanks to the doctor too, then Jem’s voice grew louder beside Alex’s ear. ‘Come on, let’s go and give her a kiss.’

They filed into Room 2. Alex went in last, Blythe’s tired eyes dodging Ted and Jem, finding their way straight to her. Alex felt the muscles in her face ready themselves for a full on explosion of something unsightly. No. She wouldn’t. She had no right to cry so she swallowed it all down and let her throat close around it like a drawstring.

‘Hey, Mum,’ Jem said softly. Alex watched Jem sweep the hair from their mother’s face so it framed her equally on both sides of her pillow. Jem dove straight in for a kiss. ‘Mum? Alex is here,’ she declared, as if presenting their mother with the magic tincture that would save her.

‘Hi, Mum,’ Alex croaked. She needed to learn to swallow before she spoke, like her dad. Alex nudged herself forwards to the edge of her mother’s bed. It felt like nudging herself towards the edge of the pool at the leisure centre, her breathing elevating with each tentative step forwards. Blythe’s eyes slid shut as if she were drifting off to sleep again but Alex knew it was her invitation to nuzzle in all that paleness. Her mother’s cheek was warm, Alex laid a kiss there and held her face over it for a few seconds, to be sure it stuck. ‘Hi, Mum.’ she whispered again, her voice steadier now. ‘Didn’t see about those butterflies then?’ Alex pulled back to see her mother attempt a smile but one side of Blythe’s mouth remained slackened, unwilling.

Blythe mumbled. Alex tried to make it out but it was like trying to pick out a familiar face on the other side of mottled glass, the outline of her mum’s words there but the detail obscured. Alex took a steadying breath. That awful sound couldn’t have just come from her mum, from the same place those beautiful arias used to reach from on Sunday mornings when Alex was still lazing in bed and her mum was trying to keep pace with her favourite sopranos.

‘How are you feeling, Mum?’ Something had happened to Jem’s voice too. Ted’s face was grave, his oil-stained hands hanging at his sides, both thumbs rubbing relentlessly against their neighbouring fingers. He was clearing his throat again, over and over, trying to ready his voice like an engine on one of his cars, it was turning over but not quite ready to fire up like it should.

Blythe murmured again, more decipherable this time, as if she were simply drunk or groggy from the dentist. ‘Hell-lo. My darl—’ Blythe stopped.

‘Oh, Mum.’ Jem whispered.

Ted still wasn’t ready, his thumb still rubbing back and forth. Alex felt that drawstring in her throat tighten again. Her mum’s eyes shone with effort. Somebody had to return her pitiful attempt; someone had to validate it. It came from nowhere, an eruption of fortitude.

‘It’s all right, Mum. Everything’s going to be all right.’ Alex smiled, forcing her facial muscles to do what her mother’s couldn’t and bluff through this new horror that had descended on them. ‘We’re going to help you get back on your feet, Mum. You’re going to be OK.’ Alex felt herself default to work mode, it was like an outer body experience. She knew this role, the gentle encouragement, the championing of small steps back to something more familiar, more bearable. For a few sweet seconds Alex was galvanised, and then she caught sight of the small glistening trace of saliva escaping from one side of her mum’s mouth. Something began crumbling inside her. Blythe didn’t need a square meal and a few shopping bags of emergency food. It wasn’t Blythe’s financial situation that was broken. It was her self.

CHAPTER 13

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

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