rang in my head as I tied Petra’s bib more firmly under her chin and dug out the pot of rice cakes.
There was another little girl.
* * *
We took the long way round back to Heatherbrae House, driving slowly along past peat-dark burns and through sun-dappled pine forests. Petra snoozed in the back as Jack pointed out local landmarks—a ruined castle, an abandoned fort, a Victorian station decommissioned long ago. In the distance the mountains loomed, and I tried to keep track of the peaks that Jack named.
“Do you like hill walking?” he asked, as we waited at a junction with the main road for a lorry to pass, and I realized that I didn’t know the answer to his question.
“I— Well, I’m not really sure. I’ve never done it. I like walking, I guess. Why?”
“Oh . . . well . . .” There was a sudden hesitation in his voice, and when I looked sideways at him, there was a flush of red across his cheekbones. “I just thought . . . you know . . . when Sandra and Bill are back and your weekends are your own again, perhaps we might . . . I could take you up one of the Munros. If you liked the idea.”
“I . . . do,” I said, and then it was my turn to blush. “I do like the idea. I mean, if you don’t mind me being slow . . . I suppose I’d have to get boots and stuff.”
“You’d need good shoes. And waterproofs. The weather can turn very fast up on the mountain. But—”
His phone gave a little chirrup, and he glanced down at it, and then frowned, and handed it across to me.
“Sorry, Rowan, that’s from Bill. D’you mind telling me what he says? I don’t want to read it while I’m driving, but he doesn’t normally text unless it’s urgent.”
I pressed the text on the home screen and a preview flashed up, all I could see without unlocking the phone, but it was enough.
“ ‘Jack, urgently need the hard copies of the Pemberton files by tonight. Please drop everything and bring them—’ And that’s where it cuts off.”
“Fuck,” Jack said, and then glanced guiltily in the rearview mirror to where Petra was sleeping. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear, but that’s my afternoon and evening gone, and most of tomorrow too. I had plans.”
I didn’t ask what his plans were. I felt only a sudden swoop of . . . not quite loss . . . not quite fear either . . . but a sort of unease at the realization that he would be gone and I would be quite alone with the children for the best part of twenty-four hours, by the time Jack had driven down, rested, and then driven back.
It meant something else, too, I realized, as we came out of the dark tunnel of pine trees into the June sunlight: no possibility of trying the attic door until he got back.
* * *
Jack left almost as soon as we got back, and although I had gratefully accepted his offer to take the dogs with him, and relieve me of the responsibility to feed and walk them on top of everything else, the house had an unfamiliar, quiet feeling to it after they had all gone. I fed Petra and put her down for her nap, and then I sat for a while in the cavernous kitchen, drumming my fingers on the concrete tabletop and watching the changing sky out of the tall windows. It really was an incredible view, and in daylight like this, I could see why Sandra and Bill had hewn the house in half the way they had, sacrificing Victorian architecture for this all-encompassing expanse of hill and moor.
Still, though, it left an odd sensation of vulnerability—the way the foursquare front looked so neat and untouched, while at the back it had been ripped open, exposing all the house’s insides. Like a patient who looked well enough above their clothes, but lift their shirt and you would find their wounds had been left unstitched, bleeding out. There was a strange feeling of split identity too—as though the house was trying hard to be one thing, while Sandra and Bill pulled it relentlessly in the other direction, chopping off limbs, performing open-heart surgery on its dignified old bones, trying to make it into something against its own will—something it was never meant to be, modern and stylish and slick,