Leo picks up a stone and throws it into the lake, sending a tern flapping into the air.
‘Hey!’ Ffion glares at Leo. ‘I’ve dragged kids home by their ears for doing that.’
‘I didn’t hit it.’
‘I’d have bloody hit you if you had.’ She stares out at the lake. Beside her, Leo starts fidgeting. God, it’s worse than taking a kid out.
‘Doesn’t it drive you insane?’ Leo says. ‘All this.’ He waves an arm at the expanse of water, the harsh rock face of Pen y Ddraig mountain looming over it.
‘Yup.’
‘You should put in for a transfer. South Wales, maybe?’
‘Yeah, I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
Ffion makes the same gesture Leo did. ‘Because of all this.’
She walks away from him, her leather boots darkening as water splashes across the toes. Leo follows, a few feet further from the water’s edge. Heaven forbid he should get those brogues wet.
‘The lake gets under your skin,’ she says. ‘It’s just always there, you know? When I was growing up, the lake was where we hung out. It’s where our mams dragged us for special photos; where we had to wash our rugby boots when they were too filthy for the sink.’
‘You played rugby?’
‘Play,’ Ffion corrects. ‘Fly-half.’
‘Have you ever tried to move away?’
She laughs. ‘It’s not Little House on the Prairie – some big homestead folk can’t leave because Mama’s apron strings are too darn tight.’ She puts on an American drawl, and Leo looks sheepish. ‘I did move, actually. I went to university in Cardiff, and then I lived in London for a bit. But my boyfriend was here, and . . . other stuff, so I came home,’ she finishes lamely.
The boyfriend bit isn’t true. They saw each other on and off during university holidays, but they were never exclusive. No question of him trekking down to Cardiff or meeting her friends. It was only afterwards that they had become a proper couple, when Ffion came back home.
Mam had been forty-four when Seren （not an accident, she told people firmly, a surprise） arrived, the pregnancy having been overshadowed by Dad’s illness. He’d missed the birth by two weeks.
Seren was four when Ffion finished school. ‘If I apply to Manchester,’ Ffion told Mam, ‘I could carry on living here. Drive in for lectures.’
‘Don’t stay home for us.’
‘But I should be here to help out—’
‘I’ll be just fine.’ Elen had encouraged Ffion to spread her wings. ‘There’s a big world outside Cwm Coed, cariad.’
It wasn’t the lake that had brought Ffion back home, it was guilt. Guilt that Elen was home alone with a small child; guilt that Dad would have thought badly of Ffion for leaving. One day she had seen a job advert, and it was as though it were calling to her.
‘I’m going to join the police,’ she’d announced. Seren was seven by then, still small enough to squeeze on Ffion’s lap. She thought Ffion the coolest sister ever; Ffion found Seren endearing and exasperating in equal measure.
Mam was quiet. ‘Who’d have thought,’ she said. ‘Ffion Wyllt, a police officer.’
‘Is it a terrible idea, Mam?’
Elen smiled, clasping her hands around Ffion’s cheeks. ‘Your dad would have been proud of you.’ They’d both cried, then, and Seren had cried too, even though – or perhaps because – she had no memory of him.
The ping of a text message brings Ffion back to the moment, she and Leo reaching for their phones at the same time. ‘Yours,’ she says, seeing her blank screen.
Leo stares at his phone. ‘I have to make a call.’ He moves away, standing beneath the trees, and Ffion walks to the edge of the lake, giving Leo the illusion of privacy.
‘But you said to call now—’
Ffion tries not to listen.
‘Well, it’s only just come through. That’s hardly my fault!’
Ah, who’s she kidding? Ffion skims a stone and tries not to make it obvious.
‘Can I speak to him? Please, Allie.’ There’s a long silence. Ffion checks her emails and sends a quick update to DI Malik.
‘Hey, little man!’ Leo says. ‘How’s it going? Happy New Year!’
His tone is so different, it’s all Ffion can do to stop herself turning around and double-checking it’s the same guy. She falls into the spaces between Leo’s words – He did? And what did you do? No way! – and the past grips Ffion’s heart and squeezes it hard. She imagines being on the phone to her own dad, and she picks up another stone, a bigger one this time, and hurls it far into the water.