Hi Cara. Meet me 5:30 am tomorrow at the place where you and Grace used to fly kites.

My heart is hammering as I read GoodSam’s reply, then reread it to make sure I’m not imagining things. I know the place he means, it’s a grassy patch overlooking Angel’s Bay. The last time Grace and I went was a couple of years ago, Grace driving her chair so close to the edge it scared me shitless. “Have you ever thought what it’d be like to drown?” she had asked, uncharacteristically dark, staring at the waves below.

“I thought you were afraid of the sea.”

“I’m not frightened of the sea, I’m frightened of drowning,” she said, glancing at the gray foam below one more time before turning her chair around.

I told Mum about it that evening while we ate fish and chips on the sofa. Mum must have told Meg because suddenly Meg didn’t want me taking Grace to Angel’s Bay anymore.

If GoodSam knows that place, that we used to fly kites there, then he must know Grace well. Maybe he’s even with her right now. The thought both warms and chills me. I want nothing more than for Grace to be alive, but I feel thrust into a world I don’t know, a world where everything I thought was real is fake, a world where miracles happen, the disabled walk, and the dead come back to life. But I don’t trust it; I can’t until I know the rules. I watch but don’t feel my thumbs as I type my reply:

I’ll be there.

19th December 2018

The glass in the sitting-room window has been replaced. It looks exactly the same as it did before he smashed it in, but since those temporary plyboards cut out all natural light it feels like a new beginning, like the house has had an operation and can see again. I sat in the window this morning while Mum got herself dressed. It was a blustery day, I watched an empty beer can clatter under Martin and Sylvia’s hedge opposite. I saw a few of our neighbors, on their way to their lives. Sylvia was first, in a beige wool coat and scarf, holding a plastic bag full of books going to the library. She gave a double thumbs-up when she saw the new window and I did one back. Susie was next, holding a hand to her hair and putting her head down against the wind as she trawled for her car keys in her red leather bag, tucking her phone under her chin to make a call as she reversed out of the drive. Then came Dennis, an umbrella tucked sensibly under one arm, like he was off to work in a bank, not to stand behind a display of dead animals all day. He told Mum at our welcome-home party that he walks to his butcher’s shop every morning. He absentmindedly patted his stomach as he said it. It had started to rain by the time Cara slammed the front door behind her. It was the first time I’d seen her in a couple of weeks. My breath became ragged and my PEG tube bit into my stomach as I leaned forward in my chair to knock on the cold window. I wanted to shout her name, but I knew that’d worry Mum, make her come running.