Weyward(62)

‘I wish Violet were still here,’ Emily says eventually. ‘She’d be gutted to be missing this. To be missing you.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Sorry,’ Emily shuffles her chair closer to the fire. ‘I always forget you didn’t really know her, you remind me of her so much. She was … odd. In the best way. I used to think that she had no fear – the things she did when she was younger! She climbed to Mount Everest base camp once, she told me. To make a study of the Himalayan jumping spider. Crazy woman.’ She shakes her head, laughing. ‘You have her spirit.’

‘I wish,’ Kate grins.

‘You do. It takes strength what you’ve done, starting again. She had to do the same.’

They fall into silence.

‘She never told you what happened? My mum said she was disinherited, that there was some sort of scandal.’

‘No. Like I said … I think it was too painful for her. So your mum had no idea what it was? This scandal?’

‘No. My dad might have known, but he died when I was a kid.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’ She has been thinking of the accident more and more lately, her perception of it shifting now that she carries a child of her own. A child she would do anything to protect. Even if that meant sacrificing herself, the way her father had done.

Sometimes, lately, she can almost believe that maybe – just maybe – it wasn’t her fault. That she isn’t a monster after all. But then she’ll remember – the blood, slick and glossy on the road. The bee brooch, forever tarnished, in her hand.

‘I had a baby, once, you know,’ Emily says softly, in a strange echo of her thoughts. Looking over at her, Kate sees tears shine in her eyes. ‘Stillborn. She’d be about your age, if she’d lived.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s all right. We all have our cross to bear.’

After Emily leaves, Kate sits for a while, watching the fire.

As she stares into the leaping orange flames, resolve hardens in her. She won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. Things will be different, this time. She is different. And she is never going back to him.

She fetches her hold-all from the bedroom, struggling slightly under its weight.

In the garden, she unzips it, pulling out clothes – the clothes she used to wear, for Simon. The skin-tight jeans, the clingy tops. Even the lingerie she’d been wearing when she left: red lace, a diamante heart quivering between the cups of the bra. She throws the lumpy shape of them onto the fire, watching as the flames burn brighter. An effigy of the past, melting away. Shreds of lace float into the air, like petals.

She stands for a while, watching. One hand resting on her belly, where her daughter swims safe inside.

December.

The days begin white and glittering with snow – on the roof, the branches of the sycamore, where a robin has taken up residence. It reminds Kate of Robin Redbreast from The Secret Garden – for so many years, her only safe portal to the natural world. Only now does she truly understand her favourite passage, memorised since childhood:

‘Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.’

Often, before she leaves for work, she stands outside to watch the sun catch on the white-frosted plants, searching for the robin’s red breast. A spot of colour against the stark morning. Sometimes, while she watches it flutter, she feels a tugging inside her womb; as if her daughter is responding to its song, anxious to breach the membrane between her mother’s body and the outside world.

The robin is not alone in the garden. Starlings skip over the snow, the winter sun varnishing their necks. At the front of the cottage, fieldfares – distinctive with their tawny feathers – chatter in the hedgerows. And of course, crows. So many that they form their own dark canopy of the sycamore, hooded figures watching. One bears the same white markings on its feathers as the crow that startled her in the fireplace when she arrived at the cottage. She is growing braver – testing herself each day by moving closer and closer to the tree. This morning, she presses her palm against its ice-crusted bark, and warmth swells in her chest.

Later, Kate is at the bookshop, thinking about this and smiling. She sips coffee from a leopard-print mug of Emily’s. It’s a little after ten, and she wants to get through five boxes by lunchtime.

It’s been seven months since she left. Sometimes she feels as if she’s always lived in Weyward Cottage; always had this routine of waking with the sun, then either spending time in the garden or walking leisurely into the village for her shifts at the bookshop. Even some of the locals seem to be starting to accept her. According to Emily, they treat her with the same slightly baffled acceptance they reserved for Aunt Violet.

Other times, it’s harder to forget what happened.

Her phone rang last night at 2 a.m., its blue flare jolting her gut. A number she didn’t recognise. She knows it wasn’t him calling. It’s impossible: he doesn’t know about the Motorola; doesn’t have the number for it. But it doesn’t stop her from running through scenarios in her mind as she sorts through boxes of books, worry ticking inside her.

Thank God he doesn’t know about the baby.

‘Oh, Kate?’ Emily walks into the storeroom, a welcome interruption. She crouches next to a stack of weathered-looking boxes under the window. ‘Someone dropped this off yesterday … I think you might find it interesting.’ She grunts as she lifts a box from the top of the pile and plonks it down in front of Kate.