“Midnight woman?” I prompt. He doesn’t react. The phrase is vaguely familiar, something in the local dialect. “A midwife, do you mean? But my mum didn’t have a midwife.”
Michael leans forward to peer at me suddenly.
“Where did you really come from, my dear?” he asks me. “You’re not a Summerbourne twin at all, are you?”
There’s a loud crack, and suddenly my hand holds only the lower half of my lemonade glass. Curved shards of the upper half skitter away across the tabletop and tumble to the grass beneath.
Joel jumps to his feet. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
I can’t catch my breath. And I’m staring at Joel because, despite the look of repulsion in his eyes, there’s no surprise. He’s heard all this before.
“Are you okay?” he asks me again, easing the jagged-edged base of the glass from my fingers.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I must have—misjudged...”
Michael tries to stand, distressed. “Joel? Who is this?”
Joel bends over Michael’s chair, blocking me from his sight.
“It’s all right, Grandad,” he says gently. “Sit back down. Everything’s fine.” He sweeps the shards of glass away from Michael’s end of the table, into the jagged base section, and Michael relaxes back in his chair and sighs.
“You’re a good boy,” Michael murmurs, and then turns to pluck another dead flower head.
My heart continues to jump as Joel walks with me back to my car.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “He’s getting worse. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
His gaze rests on my car, and suddenly I’m acutelyconscious of how dirty it is. “I shouldn’t have asked him those questions,” I say. “It was my fault.”
While Joel’s focus remains on the car, I seize the opportunity to examine him in sideways glances. He’s tense, but underneath that he looks tired, the stubble on his face adding to the impression that he hasn’t been getting enough sleep. I have no idea what else is going on in his life these days. It hurts to see him looking so unhappy.
“Areyouall right?” I ask eventually.
He looks at me then, and his dark eyes shine with emotion. I lean closer to him despite myself. He shakes his head.
“He loved telling all the old stories when I was a child, you know? Down at the pub, everyone gathered round him—he was the expert on all the local folklore. Some of it he got from his grandmother, I think, and some of it I expect he made up. He loved being the center of attention. Thrived on it.”
I nod. I have no memory of ever being taken to the village pub when I was a child, but I remember Michael spinning tales to Danny and me when he paused for a mug of tea in the Summerbourne garden. He could conjure images in our minds quite effortlessly—sneaky pirates, angry fairies, kings and queens and wicked witches.
“And he told newer stories too,” Joel says. “Gossip, you’d call it, really, mixed in with fanciful embellishments. Some of it maybe too real, too close...”
I watch his forehead crease as he remembers.
“Ruth and Robin,” he says. “And Theo. Especially Theo, like it was all some horrible nursery tale. It gave me nightmares. I used to wonder sometimes—” He squeezes his eyes shut. I wait. “I used to worry that maybe it wasmewho undid Theo’s straps. I used to think I could remember seeing him fall.”
I stare at him. “Joel, no. That’s impossible. You were twoyears old then. You wouldn’t have been out there on the cliffs on your own.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and then draws himself up, seems to give himself a shake.
“I know. Of course, it’s ridiculous. It just—it brought it back, hearing him just now, those horrible stories, and I’m—” He cuts off whatever else he was about to say.
I want to tell him I’m here for him. To tell him everything will be okay. I reach my fingers toward his, and he catches hold of them, and for a moment we stand there, linked, and my pulse rate soars.
“I wish—” he says, and his eyes search mine, and I hold my breath as I wait for him to continue. But his gaze slides over my shoulder to the cottage garden where Michael still sits, and my fingers slip from his, and then we both take a deep breath and turn to look at my car.
“I’m so sorry about your dad,” Joel says eventually, and all I can do is nod, and then I climb into my car and leave him standing there, his figure a blur in my rearview mirror as I drive the final hundred meters back to Summerbourne.
In the shed behind the stable block, I knock over rakes and hoes in my hurry to pull out a gardening fork, leaving a jumble of wooden handles crisscrossed behind me. I march back to where the letters scar the front lawn and stab the tips of the fork into the sunbaked ground, stamping on the horizontal bar in an attempt to drive the prongs farther in. I manage to lever up clumps of earth and twist the top layer of grass and soil until the word is obscured.Kids, I tell myself.Just kids from the village, messing around.
