Once the front door is closed, Ffion gets out her phone and looks at the message from Leo.
Will you have dinner with me?
She stares at the screen for the longest time, then puts the phone back in her pocket. Later. When she’s worked out what to say.
The house is quiet without Mam and Seren, who is almost certainly at The Shore with Caleb. Ffion wanders upstairs to find somewhere to store her books, but she’s already used every cupboard in the house. From her bedroom window, you can just see the lake – a shimmer of silver beyond the treetops – and Ffion stands and watches the sun dip towards the mountain range. A scattering of fairy lights, like fallen stars, marks out the decks of The Shore.
Dee Huxley is sticking around, and Bobby Stafford is still smitten enough by Mia to do the same, but Yasmin Lloyd has accepted an offer on what the papers are calling the murder lodge. The Charltons have separated, Blythe keeping number one as a holiday let and yoga retreat, and the second phase of the development is now under way, with lodges springing up seemingly overnight. Ffion wonders who will buy them; how the new owners will fit in with the people of Cwm Coed.
Back downstairs, Ffion eyes up the boxes. They’ll have to go in the shed. She’ll need to move them before the winter, or the damp will get them, but at least it’ll get them out of Mam’s way. Elen Morgan might be houseproud, but she’s not green-fingered. Since Ffion’s dad died, the Morgans’ overgrown garden has been loved more by wildlife than by the neighbours on either side, who each boast neat strips of begonia-edged lawn.
Ffion pushes through swathes of ox-eye daisies, sticky goosegrass clinging to her shorts. The shed is side-on to the house, the door warped so badly it only closes with a kick. Ffion puts down the box and yanks it open. Inside is a muddle of tools and bags of dried-up compost; of stacked plastic pots and fertiliser long past its use-by date. She begins moving everything to one side, to make space for the boxes.
A moment later, Ffion is wishing she’d never started. She contemplates how, if she had said yes to Huw, she would never have needed to set foot in this shed. That, really, she’s only here, among the rusty tools and the bags of compost, because she can’t stop thinking about Leo. She pulls out a bag and the contents spill on to the floor in front of her. ‘This is all your bloody fault, Leo Brady,’ she mutters. But, as she bends down to pick them up, she realises what she’s seeing. She sits down among the dirt and the spiders, suddenly light-headed.
This changes everything.
SIXTY-FIVE
JUNE | FFION
Pen y Ddraig mountain looms high above Llyn Drych, the water shimmering in the last of the evening light. A tiny boat tacks slowly from one side of the lake to the other. On the shore, a handful of day-trippers are barbecuing on piled stones; smoke, and the smell of sausages, drifting hazily into the warm air. Ffion looks for her mother.
Across the water, The Shore has doubled in size since last summer. The slope of the forest means the second row of lodges is higher than the first, although nothing could match the panoramic views of the front five properties. There are people on the middle deck – too small to make out – and, as Ffion watches, someone dives from the pontoon, shallow and long.
Elen Morgan never swims with a float, and she shuns the brightly coloured swim hats advised by the lake wardens. Like Angharad, she swims barefoot, seemingly unaffected by the sharp stones around the water’s edge.
Ffion scans the lake until she catches movement, travelling from one buoy to another. Elen swims breaststroke; unhurried, but faster than most. No splashy showmanship, just smooth, even strokes, low in the water. She is as much a part of the lake as the reeds which edge the coves; as the buoys which spend all year in the water, weeds clinging to their chains.
Ffion sits on the end of the jetty, letting her feet dangle in the cool water. Beside her is the black bin bag from the shed, and as Elen swims closer to the jetty Ffion carefully arranges the contents of the bag. There’s a handful of photographs taken at the summer camp party, a note from Mia slipped into the envelope. Thought you and Ffion might like to see these. Trip down memory lane! Elen had not shared the photos with Ffion and, as Ffion looks through them now, she can see why. In every photo, Rhys is looking at Ffion, or Ffion is looking at him.
Elen Morgan knew Seren’s father had been at that party. These photographs had been enough to send her in search of proof.
Elen had sent for a DNA test. Wrapped in a carrier bag is a an ebony hairbrush, the letters RL etched on the back, and a folded piece of paper.