“Do you think we could find Laura?” I ask him. “If she’s the one who took the picture, maybe she could tell us...” I bend closer over the image, gazing at my mother’s hair, the way she cradles the baby. “This was literally a few hours before Mum died, wasn’t it? This was the day everything here changed.”
“Seraphine,” Edwin says.
I look up at him. “And we don’t know why. And now Dad’s gone, we might never...” The injustice of our situation—of growing up without a mother and now losing our father in such a senseless accident—comes crashing down on me again.
Edwin’s gaze travels from my unwashed hair to the coffee stain on my dressing gown, and then he squeezes his eyes shut. “Okay, I’m going to stay another night. I can’t leave you like this. I’ll ring work first thing and explain.”
“No.” I slide the photo away across the table and roll my shoulders, stretching my neck. “Don’t be silly. I’m fine, honestly. I guess I was just wondering, really, where Laura went. Afterward.”
Edwin watches me. I concentrate on relaxing my facial muscles, dredging up an expression of unconcerned interest. He sighs again.
“She left after Mum died. I’ve no idea where she went. And she’d be—what? In her forties by now. Even if you knew where she was, you couldn’t just turn up on her doorstep complaining that one of you got missed out of a photo twenty-five years ago. She’d think you were nuts.”
I nod, and Edwin pushes himself off from the countertop, heading to the hall. The corner of the photo lifts again, and I draw it slowly back toward me.
“But if she could tell us what happened—”
He pauses in the doorway. “We know what happened, Seph. Mum was ill. She took her own life. We can’t change that.”
I press my lips together.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asks. “I can stay another night. Or, look—pack a bag and come back with me? Go out with Danny tomorrow, have lunch with Gran. Take your mind off things.”
I grit my teeth. For almost three weeks I’ve had my brothers and my grandmother staying at Summerbourne with me, handling funeral arrangements and solicitors and condolence visits. I can’t begin to express to Edwin how desperately thirsty I am now for solitude.
“No, honestly, I’m fine,” I say. “You need to go. It’s late.” I fold my hands in my lap and try to smile at him. “I’ll go to bed now. I might come up at the weekend.”
“Joel’s staying at Michael’s—I could ask him to look in on you, check you’re okay?”
I can’t suppress a groan. “Oh, please don’t.” I’d found it awkward enough shaking Joel’s hand at Dad’s funeral; I hadn’t realized he was staying with his grandfather, our old gardener, Michael, just down the lane.
“Well, could you ask someone over tomorrow?” Edwin asks. “A friend... someone from work...?”
His gaze slides away as I shrug. I’ve never felt much need for friendships, never nurtured them, and this baffles my big brother. I think of the phrase Danny uses about Edwin occasionally—“he’s not disappointedinyou, Seraphine, he’s disappointedforyou”—Danny’s wry tone softening the thorny truth of it. Not for the first time, I swallow down my frustrated response.I’m fine as I am, Edwin. Leave me alone.
I allow him to hug me at the front door, leaning against him for a moment, inhaling the honeysuckle scent of the fabric conditioner that our grandmother uses on our clothes when she stays here. When I pull back, I keep my gaze lowered to avoid having to look at the tension creases around his eyes.
“Get some sleep, Seph,” he says.
“I will.”
Back in the stale air of the study, I switch on the overhead light and eye up the paper towers. An image of a blue company logo niggles in my memory. I start on the documents that I cleared from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet this morning, and within five minutes, I’m holding the au pair agency form—faded ink on flimsy paper.
Laura Silveira was eighteen years old in 1991, and her home address was in London.
I type her name into my phone, then try the address, but come up with nothing that convincingly fits a woman who worked here as an au pair over twenty-five years ago. I carry the form down to the sitting room and pull out the family photo album that covers 1991 and 1992, gingerly turning the pages that show life at Summerbourne during her eleven months of employment here, up until the blank double page when we were born.
She appears in only half a dozen pictures. The clearest is labeledEdwin with Laurain my mother’s spiky handwriting, and as I tilt the page to peer at it more closely, the ancient adhesive gives up, and the photo slides free of its transparent cover and into my hand.
I gaze at Laura’s image. In the other pictures, she’s on the margins, glancing away, the focus on Edwin and frequently his best friend, Joel. In this one she smiles at the camera as she holds Edwin’s hand in front of the rock pools. She’s tall, athletic, with a mass of dark hair tied back. The agency document says she was taking a year out to repeat her A-level exams following “difficult circumstances at home.” I study her face. Were there complex emotions within her smile? To me, she simply looks happy.
The sun has set, but the heat of the August day lingers. I prop the family photo on my bedside table, and the eyes of my so-much-younger father and brother follow me as I roam restlessly around my room.
It was never a taboo subject exactly, my mother’s suicide, but we were only given a limited amount of information as we were growing up. Seeing her in this picture, gazing calmly downat her indistinct bundle, contradicts everything I’ve ever imagined about that day, and reminds me forcibly that there’s no chance now of ever hearing the full details from my dad. But if Laura was there—if Laura saw what happened between this photo being taken and our mother jumping—perhaps I don’t have to spend the rest of my life not knowing after all.
I shove the previous night’s nest of sheets off the bed and stretch out flat on my back, my fingers splayed, as I wait for a hint of breeze from the open window.
Inside the red-black of my eyelids flicker the faces of children who were a few years above me at the village school—sly-tongued kids who used to call us the sprite twins, and ask me repeatedly why I didn’t look like my brothers. Vera, my grandmother, used to tell me they only taunted me because I reacted with fury, unlike Danny, who could shrug any teasing off with a laugh.
