It had made her laugh. Her mother had always seemed old, even when she wasn’t. It’s probably how all daughters see their mothers. But with Kathryn, there was an anxiety, an overprotective fearfulness, that made her seem that way, as though … As though what? It brings her to the same point she always reaches when she thinks of her mother. The point where she realises she never knew her from the inside. Maybe no-one ever knows their mother that way.

She picks up the cup and sips. It’s a night thing, tea. During the day, she survives on coffee. But at night, tea, Russian Caravan, and always in a blue china cup that was her grandmother’s. Another thing that was her grandmother’s.

She opens the exercise book, with its lines of swirls and loops, some parts in blue ink, some in green and red. A gift of words her grandmother had knitted together for her more than half a lifetime ago. A special gift she had never delivered herself. It’s a bleak world her grandmother is painting, bleak and strangely threatening, with things she’s reluctant to tell. But it’s a world Grunnie had wanted to pass on to her, for whatever reason, and it had been withheld—hidden away, as Wendy had suggested.

The line on the top of the page:

I will not forget you, Fish Meggie.

Her face softens. The words of Magnus Tulloch, her grandfather, Meggie’s wee cooper boy. How Grunnie would have loved this accidentally wonderful naming of the great-grandson she never knew. He was born years after she died, but her mother hadn’t said anything, had never reacted. Surely she knew? But maybe not. Laura has no idea what Kathryn knew about her mother’s early life, or her father’s.

Meggie and Magnus—love at first sight. How could anyone want to hide away something as precious, as miraculous, as that?

16

Avril

It isn’t her imagination. It isn’t coincidence. The movements are minute and sporadic, barely perceptible, but he is responding. A girl with an albatross feather is picking her way across broken synapses. A girl good at mending things torn and unravelled.

‘It’s come all the way across the sea, this feather,’ Avril reads, ‘an’ blown up to the moors an’ into a place it doesn’t belong, never to be seen again, never to return. But I found it, Kitta, see?’

She pauses to watch. No movement.

I wonder what her voice sounded like, Coop. I can’t think of anyone we know with that kind of accent.

His limbs are still.

She reads again. ‘I found it an’ I brought it back, back to be near the sea again. It means ye’ll come back, Kitta. I will always find ye, no mind what stranger-place ye go. Ye’ll always come back to where ye belong because I will find ye, see?’

She listens and waits. Sighs.