The Witch Elm - Tana French Page 0,68

the garden got scraggly—but I sometimes joined her anyway. I’m not a gardener; mostly all I did was follow her around with a bag, picking things up, but my mother is a sociable person and she seemed to like the company. Either she thought I was all better or she was putting in some superhuman effort of will, because she had quit trying to lure me home or buy me emotional-support guard poodles. Mostly we talked about books and her students and the garden.

“We’re getting there,” she said one afternoon. We were digging out the dandelions that had grown tall and muscular among the flowerbeds. It was still warm as summer, but the light was starting to shift, turning long and low and gold towards autumn. In the kitchen, Melissa and Hugo were starting on dinner; it was Melissa’s turn to pick the music, the Puppini Sisters’ version of “Heart of Glass” was bopping cheerfully through the open doors. “It’s not going to look like it did in your grandparents’ day, but it’ll do.”

“It’s looking good,” I said.

My mother sat back on her haunches, swiping hair back from her face with one arm. “I get that Hugo doesn’t care that much either way, you know,” she said. “But there’s nothing I can do, so I’m doing what I can.”

“He’ll be happy,” I said. “He hates dandelions.”

“And I feel like I owe this place. Even though it’s not my ancestral home.” She tilted her head back to look up at the house, shielding her eyes against the light. “It meant a lot to me, you staying here during the holidays.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

She made a face at me. “Not just because I wanted you out of the way so we could hang out in Sicily getting drunk on dodgy grappa. Although that too.”

“I knew it. Here you told us you were going to museums.”

My mother laughed, but only for a moment. “We worried about you being an only, you know,” she said, “your dad and I. We would’ve loved a couple more, but there you go. Your dad was just sad about you missing out on everything he’d had with his brothers, but I . . .”

She bent to the dandelions again, wiggled a long root carefully out of the ground and tossed it into the bag. “I worried that maybe you spent too much time being the center of the world,” she said. “Not that you were selfish, you’ve always been generous, but there was something . . . I thought it would be good for you to have Susanna and Leon as sort-of siblings, at least part of the time.” With a quick up-glance at me, questioning: “If that makes any sense.”

“Not really,” I said, grinning at her. “But that might be too much to ask.”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Disrespectful child. Are you calling me flaky?”

Strands of pale hair falling out of her ponytail, streak of dirt on her cheek: she looked young, she looked like the dauntless laughing mother I had adored as a kid, whose direct blue gaze had been a sweet shot right to my heart. I’m sorry, I wanted to say, not for teasing her but for everything, for being an arsehole over the last few months and for the terror she must have felt and for her only child being such a spectacular disaster area. Instead I said, “Hey, if the shoe fits,” and she waved her hoe threateningly in my direction, and we stayed out there together, weeding, till my leg was wobbling and I could barely hide the exhaustion and Melissa called from the kitchen door to say dinner was ready.

* * *

My cousins were a different story. We did manage flashes of the old closeness, but too much of the time we just pissed each other off. They were different from how I remembered them, and not in good ways. I knew it had been a long time since we’d hung out together, people change and grow apart and yada yada yada, but I had liked them a lot better before.

Leon had always been mercurial, so it took me a while to notice that there was more than that going on now: his moods weren’t just changeable, they were elaborately, deliberately layered and coded. I followed him out to the terrace for a smoke one afternoon—by this point I was pretty sure Melissa and Hugo both knew I had started smoking, but given everything else that was going

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