They walk through the graveyard, taking the familiar route past the huge oak tree with a twisted trunk and holes that Charlie can sometimes spy squirrels darting into. Their home is thirty minutes from here, a rustic, five-bedroomed villa on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon, with oak-beamed ceilings and views of the Malvern Hills. They moved a couple of years ago, just after she and Ethan spent a month in New Zealand instead of splashing out on a wedding. The flat was never going to be spacious enough for them all. Luckily, when Ethan set up his own Pilates studio, it took off, and they could finally buy a house.
Their downstairs neighbor Margaret took the move personally and refused to say good-bye.
Luna lays the rowan wreath on Liv’s grave, then stands for a moment in silence, as she does every year. She remembers the night she received the call from Cassie.
“Are you sitting down?” she’d said. “You need to sit down for this. Trust me.”
And then the long drive north with Clover, Ethan, Saffy, and Charlie, to see her mother. She had been turned inside out with anxiety the whole way there. When she’d walked into Cassie’s home, she saw a woman in the chair by the fire. She was young and she looked ill, her hair gone and her face puffed up from the chemo. But Luna knew who she was.
She’d promised herself not to cry. But when she saw Liv, it had spilled out of her, and the room had spun and she was transported back to being a child again. “Mum!” she’d shouted, a word and a tone that had not left her lips for many years. She’d wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist, and Saffy and Clover had fallen against Liv’s legs, and they all wept until they were wrung clean of tears.
Liv died three months later. It was longer than the doctors had predicted she’d live, and her last days were spent in Luna’s home. Before she passed, she and Finn had a small ceremony, and he adopted Clover and Saffy as his own. Luna knew she’d be looking after her sisters in England, that Finn would stay in Scotland, or perhaps he’d go back to New Zealand. But he would also FaceTime them every week. And every Christmas, they’d travel to Cassie’s home in Edinburgh and celebrate Hogmanay with first footing, a Scottish tradition designed to bring good luck for the new year, and whiskey.
Luna was tested for gene mutations to detect her chances of developing cancer. She tested low-risk, but planned to be screened regularly, just in case. And to have Clover and Saffy be tested once they turned twenty-one.
Clover is eleven now. She’s in Year 7 and obsessed with clothes, science, and Minecraft. Sometimes she calls Luna “Mum,” and Luna doesn’t correct her. She can see the resemblance herself, even when she looks in the mirror. And sometimes, when she looks at Charlie, she can see a flash of her dad, Sean. Especially around the eyes. Life continues outrageously, she thinks, in whatever form it can. An unstoppable circularity, the past always in the present.
Eilidh contacted Luna soon after they arrived back in Coventry. By then, Clover was overjoyed to be reunited with Saffy, which made her relocation to Coventry and embracing life without her mother a lot more bearable. Eilidh called right as Clover was laughing her head off in the background, and although she’s been placed on file for a checkup with local social services, there hasn’t yet been a call.
Saffy is nineteen. She’s studying history at Glasgow University and shares a flat with her boyfriend, Florin, and an assortment of houseplants. For her birthday, Luna bought Saffy a Leica digital camera that sends images via Bluetooth straight to Saffy’s laptop. Saffy still can’t get over the magic of it. Everything, all the technology she can get her hands on, is a kind of magic. She’s amazed nobody else feels this way, but then nobody else has bounced from 1998 into the 2020s like she has. She podcasts under a pseudonym, Ph0t0copied Grrl, about the witches that were killed in Scotland, with particular emphasis on the ones from Lòn Haven. She gets messages sometimes from people researching the period and has gathered more information about the women. It humanizes them, she thinks, to know their names and details about their lives.
By accident, she came across Brodie’s Facebook profile. She laughed a little too hard when she saw how he turned out. And then she blocked him.