The Lighthouse Witches(18)

“It’s only been a day,” Luna had said. “She hasn’t noticed.”

The words were out before she could stop them. Saffy’s face had twisted.

“Well, you can hardly blame her,” Luna had said. “You’re always off somewhere with your friends, or sulking in your room.”

“She hates me.”

“Once she finds out, she’ll go mental. You know she will.”

“No, Luna. She won’t.”

Luna had wanted to throttle her sister then, not least because of how terrified she was going to make their mum but also because it was Luna’s birthday soon, and she could see now that the timing was deliberate. She’d thought Saffy was starting to become a proper big sister, at long last. But she’d been hoodwinked. This was all a scheme to ruin her birthday and freak out their mum in one fell swoop.

“I hope she gets fucking arrested,” Saffy had said, taking a long drag from her cigarette. “Maybe the police will think she’s murdered me. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“You have to come home,” Luna had said. She’d wanted to stamp her foot or kick her stupid sister for being so bloody selfish. “If you don’t come home I’m going to tell everyone that you’re here, and Mum will ground you forever.”

Saffy had rolled her cigarette on the stones, then looked up at Luna, thoughtfully.

“You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone. You know you can’t go back on a promise.”

“I can. You tricked me! I made a promise because I thought you were being nice, and you’re not. You’re just doing this so you can spoil my birthday!”

“And then what happened?” Ethan asks.

Luna presses a hand to her forehead. “I think . . . I stormed out. I was going to go straight home and tell Mum where she was. But I didn’t. Even though Mum was freaking out, I kept quiet. I don’t know why.” She begins to cry. Why didn’t she say something? Why didn’t she tell someone?

“The next morning I took a loaf of bread and some milk to Saffy in the hut. But she was gone.”

“Gone?”

She nods, wiping away tears. “The hut was empty. No note, no clothing. No sign of a fight. And we never saw her again. That’s all I remember.”

He takes this in. “You were just a kid, Luna . . .”

He says it gently, but he doesn’t get it. How could he? She hasn’t kept anything from him that she hasn’t been keeping from herself. He doesn’t get that truth and memory can be too complex, too tentacled, to boil down to a linear narrative. That sometimes, silence is a form of survival.

“I can only recall little fragments, like dreams. And it’s all scrambled. None of it makes sense.”

“OK. But talking through it . . . maybe something will come back to you.”

She feels flustered, irritated. She folds her arms and pinches the skin on her forearms as she recounts the facts. She and her mother and two sisters had only been on Lòn Haven a month or so when everything turned to shit.

“What happened before you stayed at the lighthouse?” Ethan prompts.

Before?

Before Lòn Haven, she was just a normal nine-year-old going to school every day, living with her mum and two sisters on a houseboat in Bristol. Well, almost a normal nine-year-old. Her and Clover’s dad died when she was four. She barely remembers anything about him. She remembers moving around a lot. Their mother worked as an artist, and sometimes as a cleaner, and often she’d rise before dawn to work at a corner shop—anything that would pay the bills. She remembers her mum’s dungarees covered in dried paint, and she remembers canvases stacked against the walls of the house, and the ducks that would sit on the windowsill, looking for scraps.


III

They have dinner in a family-run diner in the center of the town. She tries again to phone Grace to tell her about Clover, but finds she can’t bring herself to make the call. Grace is the only foster mother she’s stayed in touch with, more an aunt to her now than a mother. What if Grace doesn’t believe her? What if, like Ethan, Grace tries to tell her that the girl can’t possibly be Clover? What if she is forced into conflict with the other person she loves, if the discovery of her baby sister becomes a wedge in her most important relationships?

Back at the B&B, Ethan strips to his boxer shorts and falls asleep on top of the bedclothes, snoring loudly. She lies beside him, still reeling from the events of the day. The shells, the scan, then the phone call . . . She tries to force memories to the surface of her mind, picturing them as stones on the bottom of a lake that she has to push upward.

But it doesn’t work like that. Memories, like stones, have their own gravity.

She thinks instead of St. Ives, of her years there with Grace. She should be grateful for that life, and she is, but it should be enough, she thinks. She attended an excellent high school, developed a strong network of good friends. Yes, she fell into drugs. Yes, she had an almost insurmountable compulsion to steal, a compulsion that still nags at her. Even now, she’s eyeing that painting of the lilies on the wall and wondering if it would fit in her bag. She shakes it off. The painting is gross, and she knows all too well the sinking shame that follows the thrill of slipping away undetected. Grace never gave up on her, no matter how many times Luna stole money from her. She was a devoted foster mother—dedicated, patient, capable of showering her with unlimited attention. Her other life was the one before that, with her birth mother, Liv, and her sisters, Saffy and Clover, a life that ended abruptly with her being dumped in a forest by her mother. Why?