Swimming at Night: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

heard it.
    “Your dad?”
    She nodded.
    The whimpering child had found its stride and a captive audience; the crying grew louder and something was tossed into the aisle.
    Finn was staring at her. “You haven’t talked about him in years. You want to see him?”
    “I think so. Yes.”
    “Has he . . . have you been in contact?”
    She shook her head. “No. Neither of us.” Mick had left when she and Katie were young children, leaving their mother to bring up her two daughters alone.
    “I don’t understand. Why now?”
    It was a fair question, but one she wasn’t sure how to answer just yet. She shrugged. Ahead, she heard a taut whisper from the toddler’s parent: “That. Is. Enough.”
    Finn ran the knuckle of his thumb under his chin, a habitual gesture when something was worrying him. “What does Katie think?”
    “I haven’t told her.”
    She could see Finn’s surprise and sensed he wanted to say more, but Mia turned to the window, ending the conversation.
    She willed her thoughts to drift away with the clouds, knowing it wasn’t the only thing she was keeping from her sister.

  3  
Katie
    (Cornwall/London, March)
    K atie sat pin straight on the church pew, her feet pressed together. Biting sea air crept through the cracks in the stained-glass windows and twisted beneath the heavy oak door. Her fingers were curled around a damp tissue, Ed’s hand resting on top. Eighteen months earlier had seen her seated in this same pew when they buried her mother, only then it had been Mia’s fingers linked through her own.
    Her gaze was fixed on the coffin. Everything about it—the polished shine to the elm wood, the brass clasps keeping it sealed, the white lilies arranged on top—suddenly looked wrong. Why had she chosen to bury Mia beside their mother, when her sister had never once visited the grave? Wouldn’t cremation have been more suitable, her ashes dispersing on a breeze over a wild sea? Why don’t I know what you’d have wanted?
    It would have been almost impossible to conceive that Mia was inside the coffin had Katie not decided, two days ago, that she needed to see the body. Ed had been cautious on her behalf. “Areyou sure? We don’t know how she may look after the fall.” That’s what people were referring to it as: the fall , as if Mia had no more than slipped in the shower, or toppled off a stool.
    She wouldn’t be dissuaded. Seeing Mia’s body would be agony, but to not see it would leave her with the smallest fraction of doubt—and if she allowed that doubt to grow over time to hope, she’d be in danger of deluding herself.
    When Katie had stepped behind the heavy purple drape in the funeral parlor, she could have fooled herself that Mia was merely sleeping. Her willowy figure, the sweep of dark hair, the curve of her lips, looked as they always had. Yet the proof of death lay in Mia’s skin. After months of traveling she would have been deeply tanned, but death had left behind its ghostly pallor so that her skin appeared a strange insipid shade, like milk spilled over a dark floor.
    The funeral director had asked if Katie wished to choose an outfit for Mia to be buried in, but she had said no. It had seemed presumptuous to dress Mia, for whom fashion was something indefinable. She fell in love with clothes for their story, choosing a loose shift dress in a deep blue that reminded her of the sea, or picking a secondhand pair of heels because she liked to imagine the places they’d already walked.
    On the night Mia died she had been wearing a pair of teal shorts. They had been arranged too high up her waist, not slung low over her hips as she would have worn them. Her feet were bare, a silver toe ring on each foot, her nails unpainted. On her top half she was wearing a cream vest over a turquoise string bikini. A delicate necklace strung with tiny white shells rested at her throat, a single pearl at its center. She looked too casual for death.
    Katie had reached out and placed