In the end, they gave her heart to Fiddler’s Woods. The rest of her they loaded into the man’s battered old van, and they drove a long way, the hot, sweet smell of her flooding the cab and making the man grimace. Eventually, when they had found a good, remote place, they took her out of the van and placed her in the grass. By that time, the sky in the east was turning a burnished silver color, and the man was eager to be gone.

“A lot of tidying up to be done lad, and don’t think you’ll be getting out of that. It’s important you learn it. A proper good clean will save your neck.”

Michael ignored him for the moment. The woman in the grass looked oddly serene, her eyes turned up to the brightening sky, everything below her collar bone a churned, butcher-shop mess. He knew why she looked so peaceful; because her heart was in the cold, black dirt, deep in the roots of the ancient wood. With a single gloved finger, he drew a heart in her blood on one of the few patches of her skin that wasn’t ruined.

“A heart for a heart,” he said.

And her coat. Her coat, which had been so white before, was a deep and sopping red. He smiled at that, drinking in the sight, before getting back into the van.

CHAPTER

19

IN THE SPARE bedroom with the lights still on, Heather sat in the bed with her knees drawn up to her chest, waiting for the nausea to pass. There was a bucket on the floor next to her. She had screwed up the note and thrown it in the bin in the bathroom, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the words, so neat and so damning. It hadn’t looked like her mother’s handwriting, but then how familiar was she with it, anyway? Not to mention the fact that it had been written in big, uppercase letters, much closer to the way her dad had used to write his notes: Post-its on the fridge for more milk, or receipts for building work. Nikki had said, she reminded herself, that suicidal people were very ill, that they might not be thinking clearly when they wrote their notes—perhaps this message had been her mother at her most unwell, writing accusing letters to no one in particular, or perhaps even to herself. She wanted to believe that, for the shred of comfort it gave her, but she didn’t.

She knew the note was for her.

It made sense. It was too close to all the barbs her mother had thrown at her in the months before she had finally moved out. Back then, in the dark days following her dad’s funeral, the two of them had been in a state of war, all the conflicts between them finally exposed by the loss of the one person that had kept them together.

There had been hours of silence, long periods where they kept out of each other’s way, but inevitably something would cause the other to erupt—one of dad’s old trainers wedged under the foldaway table, or a tub of the ice cream he especially liked left in the freezer. And then, like splinters working their way under the skin, these little reminders of his absence—of what Heather had done—tore all the wounds open again.