Blood Harvest Read Online Free

Blood Harvest
Book: Blood Harvest Read Online Free
Author: S. J. Bolton
Pages:
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she reached up to push her hair back. Her face reappeared. ‘I’m sorry,’ she began, like a child who’d been caught misbehaving.
    Evi shook her head. ‘You mustn’t be,’ she said. ‘What you’re feeling is very normal. Do you often have difficulty breathing?’
    Gillian nodded.
    ‘It’s completely normal,’ Evi repeated. ‘People who are suffering immense grief often experience breathlessness. They suddenly start to feel anxious, even afraid, for no apparent reason and then they struggle to get their breath. Does that sound familiar at all?’
    Gillian nodded again. She was still panting, as if she’d just run a race and had narrowly lost.
    ‘Do you have any mementoes of your daughter?’ asked Evi.
    Gillian reached to the small table at her side and pulled another tissue from the box. She hadn’t cried yet but had been continually pressing them against her face and twisting them round in her scrawny fingers. Tiny twists of thin paper littered the carpet.
    ‘The firemen found a toy,’ she said. ‘A pink rabbit. It should have been in her cot but it had fallen down behind the sofa. I suppose I should be glad it did, but I can’t help thinking that she had to go through all that and she didn’t even have Pink Rabbit wi—’ Gillian’s head fell forward again and her body started to shudder. Both hands, still clasping flimsy peach-coloured paper, were pressed hard against her mouth.
    ‘Did it make it harder for you?’ asked Evi. ‘That they didn’t find Hayley’s body?’
    Gillian raised her head and Evi could see a darker gleam in hereyes, a harder edge around the lines of her face. There was a lot of anger in there as well, struggling with grief to get the upper hand. ‘Pete said it was a good thing,’ she said, ‘that they couldn’t find her.’
    ‘What do you think?’ asked Evi.
    ‘I think it would have been better to have found her,’ Gillian shot back. ‘Because then I’d have known for sure. I would have had to accept it.’
    ‘Accept that it was real?’ asked Evi.
    ‘Yes,’ agreed Gillian. ‘Because I couldn’t. I just couldn’t take it in, couldn’t believe she was really dead. Do you know what I did?’
    Evi allowed her head to shake gently from side to side. ‘No,’ she said, ‘tell me what you did.’
    ‘I went out looking for her, on the moors,’ replied Gillian. ‘I thought, because they hadn’t found her, that there must be some mistake. That she’d got out somehow. I thought maybe Barry, the babysitter, had managed to get her out and put her in the garden before the smoke got too much for him, and that she’d just wandered off.’
    Gillian’s eyes were pleading with Evi, begging her to agree, to say yes, that was quite likely, perhaps she’s still out there, wandering around, living off berries, Gillian just had to keep looking.
    ‘She would have been terrified of the fire,’ Gillian was saying, ‘so she’d have tried to get away. She could have got out of the gate somehow and wandered up the lane. So we went out looking, Pete and me, and a couple of others too. We spent the night walking the moors, calling out to her. I was so sure, you see, that she couldn’t really be dead.’
    ‘That’s completely normal too,’ said Evi. ‘It’s called denial. When people suffer a great loss, they often can’t take it in at first. Some doctors believe it’s the body’s way of protecting us from too much pain. Even though people know, in their head, that their loved one is gone, their heart is telling them something different. It’s not uncommon for bereaved people to even see the one they’ve lost, to hear their voice.’
    She paused for a second. Gillian had pushed herself upright in the chair again. ‘People do that?’ she asked, leaning towards Evi. ‘They see and hear the dead person?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Evi, ‘it’s very common. Has it happened to you? Did you – do you see Hayley?’
    Slowly Gillian shook her head. ‘I never see her,’ she
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