Alex’s hand naturally migrated to the hardness of his stomach. The grin got the better of her as soon as she opened her mouth. ‘Lightning.’
Finn’s mouth gave in to a smile too. He was still beautiful; the tiny scar Ted’s wedding band had left over the bridge of his nose hadn’t changed him. A monster had risen in Alex’s dad that night. Thankfully, none of them had ever seen it since.
Alex didn’t see Finn’s head furrow. ‘OK, so what are you thinking about now?’
She didn’t want to let any more thoughts of her dad in. ‘Nothing,’ Alex replied but she already knew it was too late. She stroked Finn’s side. A futile gesture, as if she was trying to tame a piece of her coursework before the clay hardened and left her with something incomplete, misshapen.
‘Let me tell him, Alex.’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘Alex, he can punch me all he likes if it makes him feel better. It won’t change anything.’
‘I know. I just … don’t want you to say anything that …’
‘But I want to. I want to say it to him. I love you, Foster.’
‘I love you too.’ She really did. It was the only certainty. But Finn’s expression had already changed.
He cut her a smile and nodded softly to himself. ‘I know you do, Foster. You just don’t want anyone to know it.’
The sky was like a lingering bruise on the outskirts of town. Alex pulled off the main road and cruised alongside the Old Girl into Eilidh Falls, the light still steeped in the eeriness of a new day. Just over two hours without a dip into a service station was a new personal best, made possible only by non-existent traffic and two eyelid-expanding double espressos before leaving the flat.
Alex pinched between her eyes, trying to stave off her tiredness. Her dad would go mad if he knew how little sleep she’d had. She shifted in the driver’s seat, ignoring the growing ache in her back. This close to home it was pointless trying to push Dill away. He was all around her here; Dill belonged to Eilidh Falls. The tiny pocket of the world that had claimed him forever. Was it the same for Jem, she wondered, when she came home too? Jem played her cards so close to her chest you never could tell.
Another sign counting down the miles back to the Falls whizzed by the truck window. Time and distance, that’s all her dad had wanted, and she’d delivered. Now she could feel it all being undone, one mile at a time. It was always this way on the drive back to the Falls. Dill always found his way into her thoughts, transporting her back there again, setting her down perpetually on the banks of the Old Girl with him, their weeping father, and Finn in his mournful silence, as if those few cataclysmic moments had soldered them all together forevermore.
Finn had tried so hard, but Ted was never going to see it.
Alex shuddered at the recollection of that Christmas. That first Christmas after. He didn’t know what he was doing, it was the drink, not your father, Blythe had tried to say evenly as she’d gathered up sticky shards of Granny Ros’s Tutbury crystal bowl from the garden path. That was the last time Alex had seen Finn or Susannah anywhere near the house. It was also the last Christmas Alex had seen her dad anywhere near a drink, and the start of all that prickly quiet between them. Thick grey silences wedged between all the safe things they still managed to talk about, like ice forming between rocks, threatening to shatter them both.
A heavy grogginess was starting to filter in behind Alex’s eyes. She tried to keep them focused on the road ahead. Dad would never say it, that this new catastrophe was most likely a consequence of Blythe having to wish Dill a happy birthday down at St Cuthbert’s, but it would be there, in one of those silences where the rest of Alex’s failings resided.
A flash of black came up on Alex’s right side. Some sleek four-by-four sped aggressively around her. She let them pass like one of the more able swimmers back at the leisure centre, as if she had any choice. Alex checked her rear view for any more surprises. She was nearly home. Get it together, Alex. Mum needs you on the ball.
Nope, she would not think about Finn’s return any more. It wasn’t even her place. Mum was all that mattered. She would get there and find out her part to play. She would get her mum’s things together, help her wash and dress if needs be, grocery shop, cook for them, tidy the house. She’d only be back, what, a day or two? There were a hundred ways to pass a couple of days. All she had to do was help Blythe get back on her feet, and keep as best she could out from under her father’s. Simple. Everything was going to be fine, Alex smiled. It wasn’t like her Mum ever even got ill. Give it a week max and Blythe would show them all, this was just a blip in an otherwise blemish-free record of health. A momentary stumble. Wasn’t she due one after all these years? All these birthdays? Alex gripped the steering wheel a little more assuredly. Her mum would soon be back on her feet, and then Jem could get back to London and Dad would be back busting a gut keeping the garage going and Alex could just get back out of everyone’s way and they could all breathe again.
A particularly plucky yawn suddenly took hold and Alex gave in to it wholeheartedly. She sat up a little higher in her seat and began watching the familiar landscape of her youth tumble past the windows of her battered old Nissan.
Welcome to Eilidh Falls!
The sign had changed; for the benefit of the tourists, no doubt. Beneath the salutation, an image carved into the wood of a Viking longship under a hail of arrows fired from the banks of the Old Girl. As soon as Alex rolled past that image, the illusion that any amount of time or distance could ever really make a difference to her dad quickly evaporated.
It hadn’t been a nightmare exactly, Jem decided. More of a troubled sleep kind of thing, like in her teens. A sort of half-hearted insomnia. But definitely not a nightmare. Nightmares featured monsters and fear and peril, not the constant dull weight of words left unsaid.
Jem fidgeted in her old bed trying to get comfortable. She never slept well in her parents’ house any more, she realised. Not since those hideous years in high school when the late-night anxieties had first kicked in. It wasn’t easy sleeping on a lie every night, notching up the days she was keeping them all in the dark. Maybe her mum was right, the therapy might’ve helped Jem if she’d stuck with it, but it had seemed so OTT at the time.
‘Jem! It’s 3am!’ she remembered her mum rasping from the kitchen doorway, eyes blinking and vacant after catching Jem fixing a peanut butter sandwich for the third night in a row. ‘Is it nightmares, sweetheart? Or is there something else that’s bothering you? You haven’t been yourself lately, Jem. If you’re having nightmares it might help if you talk about them.’
‘I’m OK, Mum.’ Jem had reassured. ‘I only have nightmares in the run up to maths tests, honest.’ She hadn’t mentioned those long school trips stuck with Carrie Logan and the other bimbos. Or the eve of Eilidh High’s end of year discos when Jackson Cox was always expecting a slow dance with Jem and, rumour had it, a proper good snog.
Jem lay awake in bed remembering how she had tried to play it all down to her mother. To allay the worry she had seen in the tiny furrows on Blythe’s faintly freckled forehead.
‘It’s not healthy for a fifteen year old girl to be sneaking around in the dark every night.’
‘I’m doing peanut butter, Mum, not cocaine,’ Jem had tried, but it didn’t matter. Blythe wouldn’t have it. Alex had buggered off to uni and that had left Jem alone under the spotlight. By the time she’d crawled out of bed the next morning her mum had already made the appointment.
‘She says she doesn’t want to see a shrink, Helen,