Since Cooper’s accident, Laura’s been feigning a calm she doesn’t feel, for Avril’s sake as well as her own. But now she’s been jolted out of it—ironically, by something that has nothing to do with Cooper at all: the utterly surprising revelation that there might be a shred of truth to all those romantic fairytales about the one. Kathryn had been divorced twice and heartbroken too often, and Dad hadn’t been lucky in relationships, either. As for her own brokenness … well, she and Jarrad had been a mistake almost from the start, and if she hadn’t lost him to cancer when Cooper was ten, no doubt the marriage would have stuttered sadly to an end. And then there was Michael who, after their six years together, said he wasn’t sure. She declined his offer to hang around until one of them had a reason to move on, and after that had withdrawn. Being alone seemed preferable to the prospect of repeating her mother’s unhappy pattern. But now, here’s Grunnie Meggie—of all people—not only reminding her what it’s like to fall in love, but revealing this unguessed-at artery of blood shared by two hearts; something you can live your life perfectly well without, in ignorance of its existence, but with which you are made complete. It isn’t the romance of it—at least, not just the romance; her grandmother’s words touch in her a seam of regret, a longing, for something never had. Too late, of course. It doesn’t matter now.

Laura sighs.

Would she have responded differently, squeamishly, if she’d read her grandmother’s love story as a brash, careless twenty-one-year-old? Maybe. Probably. But she would like to believe, instead, that her cruel, selfish younger self might have had the grace to recognise it for the immensity of what it was: hope.

20

Avril

Avril?

She looks up. The exercise book falls slackly on her lap.

Joley is leaning over her. Are you all right?

How to explain her tears are for a girl who walked into the sea more than a hundred years ago? Fine, she tries, but it comes out all wrong and she is weeping into the sleeve of the borrowed pastel shirt. She grabs her coat and her cigarettes. A helpless gesture of apology to Joley and she rushes to the stairwell. Inside the confined concrete space, she slumps on the bottom step, still weeping.

What now? she asks herself eventually. You’re on the ninth floor, Avril. She contemplates lighting a cigarette but a fire alarm would probably go off if she did. Rubbing her eyes, she walks down to the next floor and takes the elevator to the ground.

There’s no-one else by the ambulance bay in the still-dark morning.

… the bloody mess of a barely human thing. Meggie’s words.