thoughts had been vague and distracted as she’d watched the waves, towards her Gammy. Still the head of the family – if only by distinction of age and experience – she was surrounded by the chat and noise of a family who loved her very much, the smells of roasted vegetables and meat on the warm air, a light drizzle kissing the windows that looked out on the bay, and yet Sadie had never seen her look so lonely. Small and inconsequential and sad… so utterly lost. Even though her family were all squashed together around the table, it was like there was a space around her that should have contained Gampy – the man she’d loved so much. Gammy’s protection, her buffer, her steadying anchor, all her strength, had gone. Life still had to be lived, of course, even when some were lost to it, but though the Schwartz family were doing their best to soldier on, one member – April – was in serious danger of getting left behind.
‘Gammy…’ Sadie said gently. April turned to her.
‘Yes, darlin’?’ she replied, forcing a brave smile.
‘Do you want some wine?’
April shook her head. ‘Water will be just fine for me.’
‘It’s nice wine,’ Sadie said.
‘I’m sure it is. Maybe later.’
Sadie glanced at a side plate that had contained a small starter of melon and Italian ham. Everybody had eaten theirs apart from April.
‘Didn’t you like the melon?’
‘Oh yes, I liked it just fine,’ her grandmother said. ‘I just wasn’t so hungry.’
Sadie looked again. It didn’t look as if April had touched it at all – not even to taste it – but she let the matter slide. Before she could say anything else, her grandmother had turned to listen to something that Graham was saying.
Sadie had always thought it a little clichéd when people said that when someone died, a little bit of the people who loved them most died too, but she’d been able to see it clearly since they’d lost Gampy. The evidence was there now in the small figure of her grandmother. Once she had been April Schwartz, feisty, outspoken, quick-witted, smart and adventurous, the woman who had forged her own path in life in a foreign country with the man she’d loved by her side. Now she was only a memory of that woman, and even that was fading faster than Sadie could bear to see.
‘Sadie…’
Sadie shook her head to clear it. ‘Huh?’ She turned to see Ewan looking expectantly at her. Clearly he was waiting for an answer to something, though Sadie had no clue what the question had been.
‘Salt,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘Could you pass it?’
‘Salt?’ Sadie repeated.
‘Salt…’ he said. ‘Dopier than usual and that’s pretty dopey. Burning the candle at both ends again? Another late night with Whatshisface?’
‘No.’ Sadie handed her brother the salt cellar. ‘Whatshisface is now Gonehisface.’
‘Ah,’ Lucy said, tossing a dark curl away from her face and picking up her wine glass. ‘I didn’t dare ask about the love life but as Ewan opened up the discussion anyway…’
Ewan grinned at her and then turned back to Sadie. ‘When did this happen?’
‘A couple of days ago,’ Sadie said with a deliberately airy tone. She knew that she was about to get a serious ribbing from her brother, who seemed to find almost everything she did these days a rich seam of things to rib her over, and she was determined not to give him the satisfaction of thinking she cared.
Ewan looked at Kat with eyes full of mischief. His were a soft brown, just as Lucy’s were. Both Ewan and Lucy were blessed with dark, thick curls and dark eyes like their mother’s. Only Sadie had inherited the grey-eyed, auburn-haired colouring of their dad’s side. It sometimes made her feel like the odd child out, as if she didn’t really belong, and growing up that feeling hadn’t been helped by the huge age gap between her and her siblings. In his meaner moments, Ewan would tease her that she’d been an afterthought, a baby who had arrived when their parents thought they’d finished, and often Sadie thought that was true, even though Henny and Graham would never have said it to her. But Ewan was thirty-eight and Lucy was thirty-six and Sadie was twenty-six, so the figures spoke for themselves really.
‘So,’ Kat chipped in as she took the salt from Ewan, ‘on a scale of one to ten, how bothered are you?’
Sadie couldn’t help a slight smile as she poured herself