Ffion leaves her clothes in a neat pile on top of her boots and picks her way across the shore. The sky is white with snow clouds, and the wind whistles down from the mountain to swirl around the valley. Her toes find the water between the stones and curl up in complaint, numb before she’s even reached the lake proper. Christ, it’s cold. Feet. Ankles. Calves. Knees. Thighs – God, thighs! Big breath in, then exhale and—
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
You have to stay in till it stops hurting. Get out too early and you’re just cold. Stay till the endorphins kick in, though, and you get a head-rush like nothing else in the world. Better than booze, better than drugs. Better than the brush with razor blades Ffion had at fifteen, feeling as though the darkness would swallow her whole.
She swims breaststroke, counting the seconds in her head. Five minutes is three hundred seconds; ten minutes is six hundred. Any longer is dangerous – she’s not used to swimming in these temperatures.
Is that a hundred and sixty-five, or a hundred and fifty-six? She starts again. Her brain’s foggy, but it’s beginning to happen; she’s feeling the buzz. Her arms and legs tingle, and slowly, where there was cold, there is now warmth. Heat spreads through her body, giving strength to her limbs and making her laugh out loud.
Ffion reaches the first buoy and turns around. As she heads back to shore, her stroke stronger now, and her breathing steady, she sees Leo. He’s standing by her car, his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat, watching her.
She saw a different side to him yesterday. When he’d opened up about his son, about leaving him alone, everything had made sense. The way Leo allows himself to be spoken to; the way he is accepting Harris being taken away. Even the way Leo lives, in that bland, lifeless flat. The man wears his life like a hair shirt.
He waits by the edge of the water. She’ll have to stay here until he leaves, she thinks, for one single, absurd moment. Or swim along the shore and get out in the trees, run home . . .
In your swimsuit?
You’re a police officer. You work together. Pull yourself together, Ffion Morgan!
Ffion slows down, but the rush is passing and the cold returning, dragging her legs down through the water. There’s nowhere else to go.
Getting out is agony. Ffion’s feet are blocks of ice, cut to ribbons on the stones and so numb they could belong to someone else. Her teeth chatter violently, her head spinning so fast she has to put out a hand to steady herself.
‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’ Leo says, but he’s not angry, the way he was when he found out about Huw, about the CCTV.
Ffion rubs at her arms, pink from the cold. She drags the straps of her swimsuit down over her shoulders, her fingers refusing to comply, then pulls her T-shirt over still-damp skin. If Leo gets a flash of breast, he doesn’t react to it. Doesn’t care, Ffion supposes, now he knows who she is. She puts on her jumper before drying her legs, half sitting, half falling on to the ground, where she tugs her jeans over clumsy feet. She’s shaking, but whether from cold or fear she doesn’t know.
The truth? The truth has been buried so long ago she sometimes doubts it herself.
‘Ffion.’ He holds out a hand. Ffion hesitates, then allows him to pull her up. She can’t stop shaking, the cold in her bones, in her veins, and she feels the pricking of tears at the backs of her eyes, hot and scared.
Leo takes off his overcoat, wrapping it around her and pulling it tight across her chest. Ffion’s legs buckle and she forces herself to stay upright, not to fall against him. She’s crying now, ashamed of herself, but then what’s new?
‘I know, Ffion,’ Leo says gently, his eyes locked on hers. He holds her shoulders, firm and solid. ‘I know.’
The words hang between them and Ffion begins to weep. She’s glad of the cold now; of the numbness she wishes she could have felt all those years ago. She thinks of the way Leo opened up to her yesterday and wonders how it would feel to do the same.
‘I gave Elijah a call last night. Figured I owed him an apology.’ Leo gives a wry smile. ‘Turns out he’s not the only student on his course with a home-made lab: a mate of his has a side hustle doing private forensic tests.’
Out on the lake, a bird calls.
‘There had to be a reason you stopped your sister from giving an elimination sample, so I took a hair sample from the pirate hat your mum gave me for Harris.’
Ffion holds her breath.
‘It’s come back as a familial match for Lloyd.’ The first flakes of snow begin to fall, softening the pebble shore. ‘Your sister is Rhys Lloyd’s daughter, isn’t she?’