Page 61 of The Light Between Worlds

He looks at me with an expression I can’t quite parse the meaning of, and I place the files Presswick gave me into his free hand. The embarrassment’s left his face and heats my own now, because this is not how I behave. For two lifetimes I’ve been cool and aloof, untouchable on a pedestal of my own making, but Ev’s absence has toppled me, has turned me into a muddled girl who weeps in back rooms because everything’s suddenly become too much.

“Hapwell!” Presswick’s voice rings out over the construction noises in the next room. “Where have you got to? I said take a walk, not climb a mountain.”

“Thank you for believing me,” I whisper, and press a kiss to the young man’s scarred cheek. “I have to go.”

Presswick says nothing about my flushed and tearstained face, just shakes her head and mutters something about young people as she shepherds me back downstairs.

When I lie down at night, across from Evelyn’s empty bed, my insides are still tied up in knots. Sleep is a long time coming, but when it does, I dream a perfect dream. It’s as though somewhere, beyond the borders of this world, Cervus is trying to apologize for all the dreadful things I’ve had to remember.

In it, I find myself in my favorite Woodlands haunt. Returned to a place I can never reach while waking, I sit on the trunk of ahalf-fallen tree that overhangs a sleepy river. The water is clear as glass, reflecting the sky. Turtles sun themselves on the bank, and the only noise is an occasional buzz of flies or the ripple of a fish as it breaks the surface. It might be any lazy summer afternoon on which I decided to escape my duties and hide out for an hour or so, except for one thing.

In this dream, I’m light as a feather. Completely free.

There’s no awareness of things I ought to be doing. No memory of how close I came to playing the Woodlands false. No nagging reminders that I’m worlds away from home.

No worry about my brother and sister. No wondering how the time is passing in England, and if my parents still cry for us at night. We have always,always, since the moment Cervus called us, been torn in two. In this dream, there’s not even a scar where the wound has healed. It’s simply never been.

I am whole. I am well. And the awareness that the people I love are whole and well too fills me like light.

I sit and sing and dip my toes in the river, until finally I wake at dawn with that dream clinging to me like shreds of hope, and what is it Evelyn used to say about hope?She would sing while I was weeping; If I listened, she would cease.

Perched on the edge of my bed, I pretend that this hope will last once I walk through the door rather than burst like a soap bubble. I stare down at the rug and try to hold on to that brief moment of freedom, but it’s already slipping away. I’m already forgetting how it felt.

When I’ve put on my lipstick and powder, combed my hair and slipped into a pair of pumps, I brave the kitchen. Mum’s seated atthe table. I pull strength from the memory of my light-filled dream, enough to sit down across from her and smile as she pours me a cup of tea.

“How are you, Mum?” I ask, and though the question terrifies me, the words ring true.

To my surprise, she reaches out a hand and squeezes mine. “Philippa, your father and I will be fine, do you know that? You don’t need to hold us all up on those competent shoulders of yours.”

I take a swallow of too-hot tea that burns as it goes down, I’m so shocked by her answer.

“If we haven’t been very present lately, it’s because we don’t want to burden you,” Mum goes on. “You take on weight you were never meant to carry. No one expected you to stay with Evelyn forever. Not even Ev. It was only a matter of time before she had to try coping on her own.”

I can’t breathe. I’ve tried to hide the guilt that dogs my steps. No one, let alone Mum, was supposed to see it. I’ll have to do better.

Mum reaches across the table and sets something beside my cup. It’s a little box, covered in Christmas wrapping paper, and the note stuck to it bears my name in a familiar, looping scrawl.

“I wasn’t sure if I should give this to you or not,” Mum says. “I found it in your bedroom, before the Yard went through everything. It just felt private, so I hid it away, and here it is. Whatever we might want or not want now,shewanted you to have it, so go on. Open it.”

My hands sit in my lap like dead things.

“Will you do it for me?” I whisper.

Mum takes the gift back and unwraps it carefully, folding thefoil paper and setting it aside. The box beneath is plain, with a gilt emblem on top I don’t recognize. Mum pushes back the lid and a small sigh escapes her. “Now isn’t that lovely?”

She lifts out a thin silver chain from which a pendant dangles, cleverly worked into the shape of a leaping stag. Once I’ve seen what it is, I can’t bring myself to look straight at it again. Coming around the table, Mum clasps the chain around my neck, handling it as reverently as if it’s a relic. The pendant rests against my skin, cool and unfamiliar. Only three people in this world know the depth of meaning behind such a gift, and how heavily it will hang upon me.

I’ve been a fool to think anyone else could uncover the truth of what’s happened to Evelyn. Scotland Yard might as well be bumbling about in the dark. As always, the care and keeping of my broken sister falls to me.

It’s time to go looking for Ev. And I listen for the hope I felt on first waking, but I can no longer hear it sing.

45

“I NEED TO TAKE A HALF DAY ON FRIDAY,” I TELLPresswick. I’ve spent nearly a fortnight working up the nerve to ask her. The pendant from Ev lies hidden beneath my blouse, next to my heart. “I’m sorry to ask when you’ve only just hired me, but I’ve got family matters that need seeing to.”

Presswick sets her pen down and gives me a shrewd look. “Family matters?”

“Privatefamily matters.”