So, he isn’t seeing someone. Relief washes across her like a warm bath. What was it he asked? Oh yes; does she want to be with him. Yes, she thinks. I really do. But the stubborn resistance to marriage is still there, and she doesn’t know why. Marriage was always in the cards. They said it would happen when they had enough money, when they could get time off work, when the time was right. And now it’s the perfect time to get married.
But when Ethan got down on one knee on New Year’s Eve, when she knew marriage was finally feasible, something inside her bolted.
And she said no.
IV
The sonographer shows them their baby boy on the screen, the occasional ribbon of blue or red showing where he’s drinking amniotic fluid or sucking his thumb. Luna has seen him on this screen so many times now—the single benefit of being high risk—but today she’s especially relieved to see that he is wriggling around like an eel. The appearance of the shells had made her fear that something might be wrong, that they were an omen, somehow, of their baby’s imminent departure.
“Is everything OK?” she asks the sonographer when she seems to be frowning at something.
There’s a fraught silence. She and Ethan share a terrified look. This is it, she thinks, and she feels her heart plummet.
“Ah, there we go,” the sonographer says. “The screen had frozen. Baby’s absolutely fine.”
She breathes out with relief and laughs. Ethan takes her hand and she squeezes it tight.
Later, as they’re waiting in the reception area for her pregnancy notes to be returned, she picks up her phone and scrolls quickly to her Facebook pages, “Have you seen Clover Stay?” and “Help Find Sapphire Stay!” Clover’s page features a handful of photographs and a home video of Clover doing handstands in a field. She’s wearing a cotton dress over jeans. Her brown wavy hair is teased by the wind and she talks to the camera, which is held by their mother. “Is it on?” she asks several times. A voice off-camera—Liv—says, “Yeah.” Luna must have watched the clip a thousand times over and yet the sound of her mother’s voice still feels like a horse kick. On camera, Clover raises both arms in the air, lifts her right knee, and lowers her hands to the grass, swinging her legs high above her until she is perfectly straight. Then she counts quickly to one hundred, wobbling as she holds her balance. She finishes with a flourish, walking two steps forward on her hands and throwing her legs over her head into a crab’s bend. Then she leaps up and runs toward the camera with a laugh, her whole face filling the frame.
Luna doesn’t have a Facebook page for her mother. She has a single photograph of Liv, sent by her uncle, that she keeps in her bedside drawer. Her mother is kneeling by a canvas propped on an easel on the stern of the houseboat where they lived for a while. She’s wearing old dungarees covered in paint, and her brown hair is worn in two girlish ponytails. She’s slim, with tattoos on both arms, and her face is turned to the camera in a wide smile, as though she’s laughing with the photographer about the painting she’s doing. In the corner of the frame, Luna can make out a child of around eighteen months old, wearing just a nappy. She’s never been able to work out if the child in the photograph is her or Clover.
The photos and video were donated by old school friends from Bristol and York. Sapphire’s page has only two pictures that Luna had managed to source from the school. One is a good-quality school photo from Year Seven in which Saffy is smiling so broadly that she doesn’t resemble the sullen, angry girl that Luna knew. The other is a scan of a blurry photo Saffy’s ex-boyfriend Jack sent—he’d found it in the back of a school notebook. It shows Saffy’s rakish frame as she stands in front of the Longing. She’s wearing jeans and a black ribbed polo neck, her blonde hair scraped up off her face in a topknot, revealing her long, pale neck—this is exactly how Luna remembers her. From the scowl Saffy is wearing, it’s likely Luna is the one who took the photo, using her mother’s Polaroid camera.
No bodies were ever found, despite extensive searches. The disappearance of an entire family may well have attracted substantial media attraction, especially given Lòn Haven’s history. But barely a week after Liv disappeared, an explosion at the nuclear power station near Glasgow drew the eyes of the national press and the government for months afterward, and the mystery of her family was all but forgotten.