I pull her on to my knee, wrap my arms around her taking care not to hold too tightly, and we face the sharp sea breeze together. Her words, though spoken in childish innocence I am sure, have unsettled me. I feel light, empty. My head aches. All familiar and no more than a lack of food, and yet I wonder. Have I become some other creature, and Annie senses the change? I cannot bring to mind now, fully, Daniel’s face, or the sensation of his touch, or the words he spoke. Perhaps that was all lived by some other being, and not me at all. The other Sarah.

‘We shall have a different life soon, Annie.’

She twists round to face me, picking out a hag stone and peeking through the hole. ‘What different life?’

‘Of a warm fire every night and a table full of food. With Daniel.’ I instantly regret my words. But what harm can Annie do? If she speaks of this they will think it just another of her stories.

‘I can’t see the fairies,’ she says, disappointed. ‘I’ve never seed them and it’s not fair, it’s they that sent me to be growed in the woods and gived to you and Mammy and John.’

‘’Tis not we that choose the seeing, but they.’

She throws the hag stone to the ground.

‘Well don’t waste it,’ I say. ‘Bring it for Mam to sell.’

She scrabbles among the pebbles to find it again.

‘Come on.’ I kiss her cheek and imagine how it will feel plumped out with rich living. ‘Do not speak of this, nor mention Daniel, to anyone. Understand?’

She frowns, nods, gathers the clams and seaweed back into her petticoat. ‘I’ll like it when my real sister comes back,’ she says.

We make our way home, confident that what we bring from our day’s work will please Mam. As we walk the path past the Taylors’ fields my heart beats quicker and I cannot help but crane my neck over the hedge. There are only lambs, rounded out now, leaping and playing unburdened by knowledge of their fate. I lift Annie to see.

As I place her back down there’s a shout behind me and hands grasp my shoulders, hard, shake them. I’m caught between fear and hope, spinning round.

John. Laughing so hard that flecks of spittle gather in the corners of his mouth.

‘Goffy,’ I yell. Angry with him mostly because he is not Daniel.

‘There you are,’ Annie says, as though we were searching for him all along. She hugs him around the waist and he ruffles her hair.

‘Hello there, little squirrel.’

‘This is our other sister. She looks like Sarah but she isn’t.’

‘That so? What were you up to, Other Sister, all night in the woods with the farmer’s lad?’