Page 98 of The Clifftop Cottage

“What?” she said at last.

Leah felt something tilt.

“Who?” Erica asked.

“Mum,” Leah said, almost laughing at the obviousness of it. “Who else?”

Erica went utterly still.

“Mum?” she repeated – and the word sounded wrong in her mouth. Raw and barely used. “I wasn’t talking about Mum.”

The air shifted.

Leah felt it physically, like a floorboard giving way under her weight.

“Oh.” The sound came out small and useless. She tried to patch it with a smile that didn’t hold. “Right. Well.” A faint, brittle laugh. “Then … who were you talking about?”

But Erica wasn’t answering.

She was staring.

Not confused, or surprised. Just wounded.

“You’ve been in touch with Mum?” Erica asked. Her voice had dropped low, controlled in a way that was far more frightening than shouting.

“She wrote to me,” Leah admitted.

“You’ve been writing back?”

“No.” Too fast. “No, I haven’t.”

“Behind my back?” Erica’s voice cracked – barely, but it was there. The fracture.

Leah saw it. This wasn’t anger, but betrayal.

And it knocked the breath from her.

“It’s not like that,” Leah said, leaning forward. “Eri, I swear. I haven’t written back. I didn’t know what to say.”

Erica’s jaw tightened.

“I just …” Leah’s voice thinned. She hadn’t meant to say any of this tonight. Not like this. “After she left that day – after Dad …” She swallowed. The old ache rose fast and hot. “I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking maybe she’d died. Or been hurt. Or lost somewhere. I couldn’t just let her disappear.”

She stared down into her glass. The brandy caught the firelight, amber and accusing.

“And then something arrived. For Maisie. On her birthday.”

Erica didn’t move.

“It was small. Wrapped badly. Brown paper and too much tape.” Leah’s throat tightened despite herself. “Inside there was this little wooden cross. Hand-carved. Crooked. And her old St. Christopher. The one she wore when we were kids.”

Still nothing from Erica. But her breathing had changed.

“No note,” Leah went on. “No explanation. Just ‘Nepal’ stamped on the envelope.”

The word felt foreign even now.

“I started searching. Church groups. Aid networks. Anyone who might recognise her name. Eventually someone said she might be living under religious vows. Some kind of lay sister. Remote convent.”