The Lighthouse Witches(95)

Forgiveness is a kind of time travel, only better, because it sutures the wounds of the past with the wisdom of the present in the same moment as it promises a better future. I’ve traveled forward in time. I don’t know how. I’m only glad that I lived.

But I’m not sure if I’ll make it, Luna. I’m not sure I’ll be able to hang on long enough to see you one last time. I’m going to try. But if not, if I slip away before I get the chance to hold you again, I wanted to write down the story of what really happened on Lòn Haven.

As you’ll see, cause and effect in this tale do not fit easily together. The pieces are odd and misshaped because truth is messy and porous.

I want you to know that I never abandoned you. I want you to know that I’m sorry for being deceived, even enough to take you into the woods. I think that everything I’ve done in my life has been pulling me back to you.

Right now, I’m sitting in Cassie’s living room watching cars move along the road at the bottom of the field, and every time I see someone my heart leaps. Snow has whitened the hills; already night has drawn a black curtain over the horizon. I’m wondering if you’ve chosen not to come. If you’ve decided that the years between us are too many, the trauma too great to put aside.

I’ll understand that, Luna. It will never make me stop loving you.

But now I see a woman walking up the garden path. There’s a baby strapped to her chest, and by her side is a little girl with red hair that dances in the wind. I feel a flash of recognition.

“Easy, Liv,” Finn says as I get up from my seat. “You need to rest.”

But I pull myself up, and he puts an arm around my waist to help me.

“It’s them,” I tell him, breathless. “It’s my daughters.”





LUNA, NOW


“We’re here, Charlie,” Luna tells her son, unclipping his seat belt and holding his hand as he jumps out.

“I’ll take the flowers, Mummy,” Charlie says.

She’s pregnant again, and on medication for the migraines that returned with a vengeance at the start of her second trimester. Luna only learned what they were when Ethan happened to mention them to one of his Pilates clients. She’d felt stupid, thinking that somehow Clover had been causing them. But then, she’d never had a migraine before she was pregnant, so how was she to know?

They walk through the graveyard, taking the familiar route past the huge oak tree with a twisted trunk and holes that Charlie can sometimes spy squirrels darting into. Their home is thirty minutes from here, a rustic, five-bedroomed villa on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon, with oak-beamed ceilings and views of the Malvern Hills. They moved a couple of years ago, just after she and Ethan spent a month in New Zealand instead of splashing out on a wedding. The flat was never going to be spacious enough for them all. Luckily, when Ethan set up his own Pilates studio, it took off, and they could finally buy a house.

Their downstairs neighbor Margaret took the move personally and refused to say good-bye.

Luna lays the rowan wreath on Liv’s grave, then stands for a moment in silence, as she does every year. She remembers the night she received the call from Cassie.

“Are you sitting down?” she’d said. “You need to sit down for this. Trust me.”

And then the long drive north with Clover, Ethan, Saffy, and Charlie, to see her mother. She had been turned inside out with anxiety the whole way there. When she’d walked into Cassie’s home, she saw a woman in the chair by the fire. She was young and she looked ill, her hair gone and her face puffed up from the chemo. But Luna knew who she was.

She’d promised herself not to cry. But when she saw Liv, it had spilled out of her, and the room had spun and she was transported back to being a child again. “Mum!” she’d shouted, a word and a tone that had not left her lips for many years. She’d wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist, and Saffy and Clover had fallen against Liv’s legs, and they all wept until they were wrung clean of tears.

Liv died three months later. It was longer than the doctors had predicted she’d live, and her last days were spent in Luna’s home. Before she passed, she and Finn had a small ceremony, and he adopted Clover and Saffy as his own. Luna knew she’d be looking after her sisters in England, that Finn would stay in Scotland, or perhaps he’d go back to New Zealand. But he would also FaceTime them every week. And every Christmas, they’d travel to Cassie’s home in Edinburgh and celebrate Hogmanay with first footing, a Scottish tradition designed to bring good luck for the new year, and whiskey.

Luna was tested for gene mutations to detect her chances of developing cancer. She tested low-risk, but planned to be screened regularly, just in case. And to have Clover and Saffy be tested once they turned twenty-one.

Clover is eleven now. She’s in Year 7 and obsessed with clothes, science, and Minecraft. Sometimes she calls Luna “Mum,” and Luna doesn’t correct her. She can see the resemblance herself, even when she looks in the mirror. And sometimes, when she looks at Charlie, she can see a flash of her dad, Sean. Especially around the eyes. Life continues outrageously, she thinks, in whatever form it can. An unstoppable circularity, the past always in the present.

Eilidh contacted Luna soon after they arrived back in Coventry. By then, Clover was overjoyed to be reunited with Saffy, which made her relocation to Coventry and embracing life without her mother a lot more bearable. Eilidh called right as Clover was laughing her head off in the background, and although she’s been placed on file for a checkup with local social services, there hasn’t yet been a call.