the corner: a stone, bright white as a skull. It’s as big as her fist and, as she glides towards it, Liyana thinks of Kumiko’s face. Kumiko, her skin pale as bone within curtains of black hair like a waning moon in a midnight sky.
“If I’m the moon,” Kumiko had said, “then you’re the night sky, curling round me.”
Liyana laughed. “All right then.”
“No, I’m not the moon.” Kumiko leaned forward. “I’m the teeth in your dark, wet mouth.”
Kumiko touched her lips to Liyana’s. Slowly, Liyana kissed her. “You’re trying to distract me.”
Kumiko smiled. “Is it working?”
“I’m trying—I want to draw you.”
“I want to fuck you.”
Liyana laughed again. “You’re not very ladylike, are you?”
Kumiko pulled back. “By whose definition?”
“Well . . .” Liyana tapped her pen to her teeth. “You’d certainly better not talk to my aunt like that.”
“That depends”—Kumiko’s smile deepened—“Does she look like you?”
“Right,” Liyana said, setting down her pen. “You’re definitely not meeting her now.”
Kumiko rolled her eyes. “Like I ever was.”
“You will,” Liyana said. “I’m just . . .”
“Waiting for the right time,” Kumiko said. “I know, I’ve heard your spiel enough times I could recite it back to you.”
“Please,” Liyana said. “You’ve got to—”
“Give you time,” Kumiko finished. “Yeah, yeah. Yada yada . . . You know what? You need to stop being so ladylike and grow some balls—or boobs, or whatever the fem equivalent is—and stop being such a fucking coward.”
Liyana surfaces clutching the stone. Shaking the water from her hair, she looks up into the face of a man. She frowns and folds her arms over the poolside edge. He gazes down at her.
“I thought I’d have to call the lifeguard,” he says.
Liyana’s frown deepens into a scowl.
“You can hold your breath for a really long time,” he clarifies. “It looked like you might not come up.”
“Fifteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” Liyana says. She doesn’t want to be talking with this man and has no idea why he is talking to her, but the desire to speak about swimming is ever-present, the words escaping before she can stop them. “I used to be able to hold it for tw—longer.”
“Used to?”
Liyana shrugs droplets from her shoulders. “Out of practice.” She glances back at the pool. She’s wasting valuable water time. “I should—”
“How often do you come here?”
Liyana’s frown returns. “Did you just ask me if I come here often?”
He laughs. “Yeah, I guess I did—sorry, I didn’t mean to.” He pulls his hand over his hair. Liyana notices that he’s quite attractive—tall, muscular, skin the colour of wet earth—exceedingly attractive, one might say, if one were that way inclined. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was only asking . . . this isn’t my local gym. I wondered if it’s worth the membership fee.”
Liyana rubs her thumb over the wet stone. It wants to return to the water. “I suppose so, I don’t know. I only come to swim.”
“How often?”
“Once a month.”
His eyebrows rise. “Really? You don’t—you look much fitter than that.”
Liyana shifts in the water, pulling her arms closer, covering the view to her breasts. “I don’t think—”
“Shit,” he says. “I’m so sorry. That sentence should’ve stayed in my head. I didn’t—”
“Mean it like that?” Liyana raises a single eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he says. “I, um, I only meant to say that you—you look like an athlete.”
Liyana regards him. In addition to being handsome, he has a voice that, even when he’s self-conscious and stumbling, sounds like a river smoothing rocks. Perhaps that’s why she has let this conversation go on so long.
I was an athlete once. The words wait in Liyana’s throat. But to let them out would incite questions she has no intention of answering.
“I’ve got to go,” she says instead. “I’ve only got forty-seven minutes left.”
“That’s—you’re very . . . precise.”
He smiles again and Liyana is caught by it, reminded of something long ago. A moon breaking through clouds. A river catching its light.
2nd October
Thirty days . . .
10:36 a.m.—Scarlet
Scarlet didn’t want to go but her grandmother had insisted. Why she’d thought a day’s apprenticeship with a Hatfield blacksmith was an appropriate eighteenth birthday present, Scarlet can’t imagine. But it’s another pitiful example of how far and fast her grandmother’s mind is declining—her birthday isn’t till the end of the month. Even so, what could she do but go along with it?
The blacksmith, Owen Baker, is the sturdiest man Scarlet has ever seen, with a head as bald as her belly, a neck as thick as her thigh, and hands almost as broad