Page 18 of Memories of the Lost

A figure appeared at the back door, a tall woman with black hair cut short, wearing jeans and a peasant blouse below her raincoat. Her face showed the hard road she’d traveled, in deep lines along her mouth and around her eyes, eyes that looked older than her fifty-nine years.

“Hey, Mum. Did you bring my carrots?”

She held up a canvas bag with greens sprouting from the top. “Lots. They’re very sweet.”

Sage waited for what she knew was coming.

“Is she kicking?” Clare asked.

She laughed, turning to offer her belly to her mother, feeling a sweet little twist of love for grandmother and child as Clare’s long hands cupped the six-month belly. As if on cue, the child in her belly shifted, pushed a fist toward the gentle voice she must surely be coming to recognize by now. “Hello, love,” Clare cooed. “How’s my darling girl today?”

Clare’s hair had begun to sprout silvery threads, the shimmery strands coarser and wavier than the rest, and it roused in Sage a sense of tenderness. She passed a trio of gentle fingers over her mother’s part as Clare spread her hands over her belly. A soft folk song played on the speakers. It had been Clare and Sage forever, before Levi, before her stepsiblings, Amelia and Meg, then their little brothers, Ben and Arthur. Just the two of them facing a world of trauma and sorrow. Sage had deserted her mother for a time, almost ten years if she was honest, but she was here now, and grateful.

“I’m so happy,” Clare said, and kissed the belly.

“Okay, that’s weird,” Sage said.

Clare laughed. “Sorry. I got carried away. Liam will be here next week for a good Sunday roast. Can you and Paula come?”

“We wouldn’t miss it.” Sage had spent a golden summer long ago with her “cousin,” technically not her blood but her mother’s best friend’s child. He’d been as lost as she that year, both of them grieving losses they couldn’t speak aloud. She hadn’t seen him since then, and looked forward to it.

“I’ve missed her while she’s been on tour. How’s she doing?”

“Great.” Paula was part of a folk duo. They’d just returned from a tour of Ireland. “She’s glad to be done with it before the baby arrives.” She plucked a sliver of ginger from the pile and nibbled it. “What can I bring?”

“Would it be too much trouble to make the roast vegetable tart? Liam is a strict vegetarian.”

Sage had spent many of her lost years cooking vegan in various places around London, eschewing meat in some strange offering of balance to her drug issues. “No worries. I love making it.”

Clare nodded, and straightened.

“What?”

She hesitated, and Sage braced herself for bad news. Clare’s eyes were the pale watery blue of a clairvoyant’s, and they flickered now. “They found some bones at a construction site. Child bones.”

Sage found a protective hand falling over her belly, felt her baby move, a tiny foot, a shoulder maybe. “Where?”

“Just outside the Roman villa, where the new development is going.”

Bones. Sage looked toward the window, stirred the ginger, let the words rest in the air, and wondered if they had any meaning for her. A memory rose, struggling to bring itself into the forefront of her mind, but she shook her head. Not today. She pushed it back into its special box where it couldn’t rake up the neat ground of her calm, ordinary life. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But, what—”

“No,” Sage said. “I’ve asked you to respect my way of managing things. This is one of those times.”

To her credit, Clare didn’t push. She only nodded and took a small cosmetic pot from her enormous cloth bag. “I made you some salve for your belly. It will help with stretch marks, healing and preventing them.”

Sage accepted the gift in the spirit it was intended. Her mother was what had once been called a wise woman—a leader among the women in the community, a healer, and in a more modern twist, an ordained minister with pagan roots. She was beloved in the town, and by her husband, and by her six children. Or, well, adored by five of them, anyway. Including Sage. “Thanks. I’ll ask Paula if she’s up for Sunday roast and let you know, but I’m sure she’ll be as happy as I am.”

“Take care, my sweet,” Clare said, and kissed Sage’s cheek, touched her belly once more. “I love you.”

For a long moment, Sage rested the heels of her palms on the counter, watching her mother go, then looked down at the tattoo rounding her left forearm, a large, graceful dragon with green eyes. She’d had him done at the worst of her dark days, a reminder that there were things about your life you couldn’t change, no matter how much you wished you could.

Then she pushed the thoughts away. Life was good now. A good marriage, a baby on the way, her famous, kind, and beautiful cousin coming to visit. The past could rest where it was, distant and unimportant.

CHAPTER NINE

New York City