And she had no time. She had to leave tomorrow, before Mr. Smith’s men noticed that the girl they were hunting was back.

Slow down. Her mother’s voice again, softer this time. Think clearly.

Slow down? she wanted to shout. I can’t slow down.

More haste, less speed.

Very well, then. She had to puzzle this out, slowly and logically.

There could not be that many suspects. Who could have been at Trepassen, that long summer? The brothers?

The entry of December 6 was still open on her lap, describing the night her mother assumed she had conceived. Hal read it through again, and again, and this time she stopped at one phrase: Our eyes met—blue and dark.

Hal’s mother had dark eyes, like her own. Which meant that whoever she’d slept with must have been a blue-eyed man.

Ezra had dark eyes—uncompromisingly so.

Abel . . . well, that was more difficult. He was fair, but his eyes . . . Hal shut her own, trying to remember. Grayish? Hazel?

Blue eyes could look gray in the right light, but try as she might, she could not picture Abel’s kind, bearded face with blue eyes, nor could she imagine him in her mother’s arms. He would have said something, surely?

In desperation she pulled the picture from her pocket—the one Abel had given her, taken the very afternoon that her mother had been writing about.

There was Ezra, his dark head thrown back, laughing with an openness so at odds with his present-day cynicism that Hal thought her heart might break a little, his dark eyes just slits of merriment. There beside him was his twin, Maud, her fair hair cascading down her back.

And there, too, was Abel, his dark-blond hair glinting in the sun. She peered closer, trying to make out his face, beneath the faded color and the frayed folds of age, as if she could see through the paper to the past, and the people left behind.

Could it be? Could she be Abel’s child?

In which case . . . she stopped, feeling something cold against the back of her neck, like a chilly hand laid there. If she was Abel’s daughter, the legacy might hold up. Was that why Mrs. Warren had said nothing? Because the legacy did belong to Hal?

The thought should have been a welcome one, but for some reason it made her feel like the bottom of her stomach had fallen away.

Before she folded up the picture to put it away, she looked very deliberately at the fourth person in the frame, at the one whose eyes she had been avoiding—at her mother, her dark eyes uncompromising, staring out at her through the years.

What are you trying to say? Hal thought desperately. She felt her hands close on the old, fragile paper, the flecks of pigment disintegrating beneath her fingertips.

What are you trying to tell me?

It was as if her mother were looking out at her from the past, right at her.

But no.

Not at her.

At . . .

Hal’s fingers were shaking as she put the photograph down, very gently, and began flicking back through the pages of the diary, back, back . . . no, too far . . . forward . . .

And there, at last, there it was.

In the crumbling boathouse Maud untied the rickety flat-bottomed skiff, and we rowed out to the island, the lake water dappled and brown beneath the hull of the boat. Maud tied the boat to a makeshift jetty and we climbed out. It was Maud who went in first—a flash of scarlet against the gold-brown waters as she dived, long and shallow, from the end of the rotting wooden platform.

“Come on, Ed,” she shouted, and he stood up, grinned at me, and then followed her to the water’s edge, and took a running jump.

And then, just a few lines later:

“Take a photo . . .” Maud said lazily, as she stretched, her tanned limbs honey-gold against the faded blue towel. “I want to remember today.”

He gave a groan, but he stood obediently and went to fetch his camera, and set it up. I watched him as he stood behind it, adjusting the focus, fiddling with the lens cap.

“Why so serious?” he said as he looked up, and I realised that I was frowning in concentration, trying to fix his face in my memory.

Hal had imagined only four people in that scene: her mother, Maud, Ezra, and Abel—the four people in the photograph’s frame. But it was not quite the truth. Someone must have been taking the picture. And it was the person her mother was looking at. The same person she had gone down to the beach with later that evening. Her lover. Hal’s father.

Hal stared at the photograph, meeting her mother’s fierce, direct gaze—and for the first time she read the intensity in those eyes as something else. Not suspicion. Not antagonism. But—longing.

Of all the people in the photograph, her mother was the one who stared directly at the photographer, challenging him—whoever he was—with her eyes, locking his gaze.

Hal had read that look quite differently—she had seen the connection between her mother and the viewer as their own relationship, as if her mother were gazing out of the past at her.

But now she understood. It was not she herself that her mother was looking at—for how could she? It was the photographer. It was Hal’s father. Ed.

CHAPTER 30

* * *

That night, Hal’s bed had never felt softer or more welcoming.

She slid under the covers and shut her eyes, but sleep didn’t come. It wasn’t that she was not tired—she was, almost to the point of nausea. It wasn’t even the thought of Mr. Smith’s men. She had dragged a chest of drawers across the front door, and she didn’t think that even they would come in the middle of the night, risking waking all her neighbors, and the consequent 999 calls.

What stopped her from sleeping was that every time she shut her eyes, she was back—between the pages of the diary, in the claustrophobia of that little room. The picture was so vivid: the narrow attic, the barred windows, the two metal bolts, top and bottom . . . when she shut her eyes, they rose up in front of her mind’s eye, as if she were back there herself, and she felt a kind of sick dread. Not just for her mother—who, after all, had escaped, and made her way here, to Brighton, and made a life for herself and her child away from Trepassen. But for those other children—for Abel and Ezra, locked in that room as children, as punishment for whatever childish misdeeds they’d committed. And most of all for Maud.

The first few times Hal had read the entries, she had been looking for her mother—trying to picture the person behind the words, and compare them to her own memories. Then she had read it again, scouring it for mentions of the boy who might be her father. Ed. Edward? She found herself remembering that cool, handsome face, the appraising blue eyes, trying to pick out any features that might have belonged to her.

Come on, Ed. The words rang inside her head as though her mother had shouted them aloud in the little room.

Ed. It was a common enough name. There must be dozens of Edwards, Edgars, and Edwins scattered around Cornwall. And yet . . .

All evening she had gone round and round, combing for other mentions that might give evidence either way, arguing for and against, back and forth. But her mother had kept her word, and apart from that small slip, every reference to her father’s name had been ripped out, or scored through.

Now, though, in the stillness of the night, as Hal went back again and again over words she had committed to memory, she found herself looking for mentions not of Ed, but of Maud.

Her own mother was oddly shadowy—perhaps it was because she spent so many of the entries describing others, but it was hard to match the uncertain, romantic girl writing this diary with the strong, practical woman she had become, after years of single motherhood. Without the evidence of her own eyes, Hal could never have imagined her mother writing with such heat and yearning about a man. Perhaps this was the first, and last, time.

But Maud—Maud was different, somehow. Though she only flitted through the pages, she felt like a constant presence in the diary; and as the clock ticked past midnight, and the rain spattered at the window, Hal found herself scouring her memory for references to Maud.

It was not just the fact that it was Maud’s legacy that she, Hal, had been handed on a plate. It was that there was something about her that spoke directly to Hal. Perhaps it was her fierce determination, her refusal to be quashed, her desire to break free. Perhaps it was her wry humor, or her generosity. For Maud’s love and concern for her cousin ran like a thread of gold in the dark throughout the diary, and even across the gap of twenty years, Hal found herself smiling at her remarks. What was it she had said about the tarot cards? Load of wafty BS, that was it. It was so close to what Hal sometimes found herself thinking when she met the more earnest practitioners that she had almost laughed aloud when she read it.