“Why’s it called the Longing?” Luna asked him.
“It’s named for the people who lost loved ones,” he said. “Sometimes they’d visit the site where the Longing was built and . . . pay their respects.”
“That’s tragic,” I said, and he nodded, but said nothing more.
LUNA, 2021
I
“Luna? Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” Ethan says as they get into the car.
Her jaw is tight. “Just drive.”
It’s almost eight p.m. They follow the directions on Google Maps to the B&B that Eilidh recommended, the air between them loud with a thousand unasked questions. She can’t be Clover, she thinks. She can’t. Except, a voice in her head says, she is.
They check into the B&B, a four-story terrace with rooms that haven’t been updated since the seventies. Luna feels a sense of relief as Ethan closes the bedroom door, the four walls of the room giving her space to begin to lay out the tangled thoughts in her mind.
Ethan sits down in the wicker chair by the window.
“Who was that?” he says after a while.
She is studying a picture hanging on the opposite wall, a sun-faded oil painting of a vase of lilies. “Who was what?”
“The girl in the hospital.”
“She’s my sister.”
He coughs out a laugh. “I don’t understand. You said . . . I mean, she can’t be more than, what, six or seven? You said Clover was twenty-nine.”
“There has to be a reason for how young she is,” she hears herself say. “It has to be genetic, or hormonal. Some kind of condition that prevents aging. Benjamin Button disease or something. Toddlers with wrinkles and brittle bones. Clover obviously has something similar in reverse.”
“Luna . . .”
“Age regression, or suspension.” She looks up. “We’ll get her checked out. We’ll find a specialist.”
His expression is so full of pity that she glances down to see if she’s spilled coffee down her dress. It wouldn’t be the first time. But no, it’s not that. Her dress is fine.
“I know how hard this is,” he says earnestly.
“She looks exactly like Clover,” she says. “Sounds like her, smells like her. She even knew the name of the giraffe. That was Clover’s special toy that she’d had from birth.”
He’s reaching out for her, nodding, as though she’s lost her mind. “I absolutely understand what you’ve been through . . .”
“No,” she says firmly. “No, you don’t. You haven’t spent the last twenty-two years trying to figure out why your mother dumped you in a forest. You haven’t spent the last twenty-two years tormented by what happened to your baby sister when you were supposed to be looking after her.”
“Luna . . .”
She stands, unable to sit any longer, her hands reaching for her cheeks. Her throat is burning with that same fierce knot that settled there the day Clover went missing all those years ago. Her emotions are the only things that ring true—her memories about what happened before and after Clover disappeared are like pieces of a shattered mirror. She remembers going into foster care, and her first night spent in a stranger’s house. She has random memories of those years—a neighbor in St. Ives who used to smoke a purple pipe, a cat that had nine snow-white kittens in a cardboard box, long afternoons bouncing alone on a trampoline. She can remember a meal she had at a school friend’s house, a steaming pot of mussels. Her friend told her the mussels were mermaid’s lips, only to laugh hysterically when Luna believed her and bolted from the table in fright. And she recalls a Girl Guides’ camp where they were instructed on knot-making, and the girls started tying one another to a tree, and Luna grew so anxious while being tied up that she vomited over one of the leaders.