Sworn Secret Read Online Free Page A

tiny bits onto the carpet and her knee all pink and bloody, there was still no sign of her mum. She went to the bottom of the stairs and leant against the banister and waited a few minutes. Twice she nearly called her, but didn’t. If she was in her studio, the room in the loft with dusty Velux windows and cork tiles that lay unglued across ply, she wouldn’t disturb her, because, even though her mum never said so aloud, Lizzie knew that this was where she was happiest.

The Wrong Type of Tree
     
    An apple tree ?
    Kate closed the door of her bedroom and rested her forehead against it. Why on earth didn’t she tell him they couldn’t possibly plant Anna an apple tree? Anna didn’t eat apples. Not unless Kate peeled and cored them and cut them into eighths, and she’d stopped doing that for her when she turned twelve.
    ‘You can peel your own apples,’ she’d said to her. ‘Honestly, you’re the fussiest child I’ve ever met. Lizzie doesn’t need them peeled and she’s younger than you.’
    Kate hadn’t said this nicely.
    She’d been tired. It was one of those days when nothing had gone right. She was hormonal. She and Jon had argued about who should have remembered to put the bins out. She got a parking ticket because she stopped to help a frazzled new mum whose carrier bag split on a zebra crossing. The warden was writing it out as she ran back to the car, and while she tried to explain he pretended she wasn’t there. When she got home and unpacked the shopping she realized she’d forgotten the milk. Then Anna had asked for an apple and Kate had told her to get one herself.
    ‘Can you peel it for me?’
    You can peel your own apples.
    The words tumbled out, hard, unbending, exhausted. Just a peeled apple. What would it have taken to peel that apple for Anna? Thirty seconds, tops. Instead she spoke unkindly. And then a little over three years later, maybe, what, a thousand days at the most, Anna was snatched away from her. A thousand days. It sounds a lot. It’s not; not if that paltry number of days is all a mother has left with her child. If only she had known. If she had, she never would have snapped. Or told her to peel her own. She would have smiled and kissed her. Taken the apple and peeled it, careful to take off every bit of skin. Then she would have cut it into the neatest eighths and arranged them on a plate to look like a flower. And she would have given her the plate and smiled and maybe kissed her forehead gently.
    If only she had known.
    If only she had known, Kate would have peeled and sliced her an apple every day they had left together. Every one of those thousand days. One thousand apples. Just for Anna.

The Tortoiseshell Comb: Part One
     
    ‘Is everything OK?’ asked Jon, as soon as his mother opened her door. Her eyes were puffed and reddened, and he guessed she’d been crying for quite some hours.
    She tried to smile but her skin seemed too taut to allow it. She didn’t say anything, just turned and walked down the hallway, her shoes tapping on the chequerboard tiles on which he and Dan used to play toy soldiers – Jon’s small regimented army always on the lookout for Dan’s renegade snipers. He hovered, unsure, on the doorstep. He had no idea of what waited, and worry dripped steadily into the pit of his stomach as he willed himself over the threshold. He wiped his feet on the sisal mat and shook the water off his jacket. Just running the short distance from the car to the front door had been enough to soak him.
    In the kitchen his mother leant against the sink. She wore immaculate black slacks and a pink cashmere sweater, her white hair put up, as it always was, in a neat bun held in place by her tortoiseshell comb. Her back faced him. Both hands gripped the stainless steel, but there was a slump in her body, a looseness to her limbs; she looked beaten. It was the first time he’d seen her anything other than stoically composed, with the starched upper lip that defined that