The light pooled on an empty floor, just her mum’s paints and equipment for the mural visible, covered up with dust sheets. Clover gave a huge, lung-squeezing sigh of relief. She’d been so scared. But as she did, she saw it. From beneath one of the sheets, a thin, gray arm reached from the shadows, a hand retrieving something from her mother’s paint supplies.
Clover screamed at the top of her lungs. She dropped the torch with a loud clatter and raced blindly downstairs, pulling with all her might at the front door until a crack of moonlight appeared, letting her escape.
* * *
—
“Do you think it could have been a badger?” Saffy asks, once Clover has finished telling her tale. “Or a fox?
Clover hesitates. “I don’t know.”
“But you didn’t see a creature. Or a . . . wildling. Just an arm of something?”
Clover nods, shaking all over again at the thought of it.
Saffy is struck by how convincing Clover’s tale is, and for a moment she glances out the window at the Longing and feels afraid. She feels a sudden rush of protectiveness toward her baby sister. Clover and Luna have such a tight bond that she’s been pushed to the margins. And it isn’t cool to be all cuddly. But now, in this unfamiliar bed, with the rain pelting the roof like frozen peas, she’s glad of Clover.
“You can’t just run off like that,” she says, feeling Clover’s legs warm against hers.
“Why not?”
“Well, you could have slipped and hit your head. And then what would we do?”
“But I didn’t slip.”
“If I went missing,” Saffy says, “would you miss me?”
“No, because you’d already be missing.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You said ‘miss’ twice. That’s like a double negative.”
“All right, smarty pants. Would you look for me if I went missing?”
Clover thinks about it. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Clover shuffles closer to her oldest sister. “Because you’re so warm.”
III
It’s time. Saffy slides out of the bed, careful not to disturb Clover, who is fast asleep. She treads lightly on her feet, rolling through her heels to her toes as she takes the stairs, aware of how a creaky floorboard could bring her mother darting out of her room and discover her headed out into the night.
She holds her breath the whole time. As she slips her coat across her shoulders. As she turns the doorknob, centimeter by centimeter, the spindle turning the old latch in the latch plate, springing the door free.
And she’s out. Her breaths are quicker now, but still she forces herself to keep her movements slow, just as Brodie taught her: pull the door behind her, quiet as a cat, let the latch slip back. Her steps away from the bothy to the meeting point are as slow as she took the stairs, until she knows that the angle of her mother’s bedroom no longer permits sight of her.
Outside, she feels a sudden elation at the wind on her face and the unloosed surf and the stars with their untrammeled light. She heads to the meeting point and sits down, letting her legs swing loose over the rocks. Gold houselights glitter on the other side of the bay. She knows which of them is Brodie’s house. In her bedroom she has turned all the shells and pieces of driftwood he’s gifted her toward his house, as though it’s a kind of mecca. She’s sure her heart even moves around her chest cavity these days like a rose seeking the sun.
But where is he? She turns her head from side to side, taking in the velvet expanse of the ocean on her left and the rocks and beach on her right. Ahead, surf furls into the bay. Something there catches her eye, and she wonders if it’s the basking shark, Basil, with his weird two fins. Something bobbing in the water. Seals, probably. Except it’s the wrong color. It’s pale.