Ffion waits on the drive as Huw drives away, then puts the box of books in the hall with the others, despite Mam’s protests. “I’ll put it away later,” she promises, although where, God only knows. Mam’s house is bursting at the seams.
“That’s what you said when you moved the last lot of boxes back,” Elen says. “Three months later, and we were still stepping over bags of clothes to get to the loo.” She pulls a towel from the drying rack. “I’m going for a swim. I don’t want to see those boxes when I get back.”
“Sir, yes sir,” Ffion mutters, because even when you’re thirty, mams make you feel thirteen again.
Elen scrutinizes her daughter’s face. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Don’t start, Mam.”
“He’s a good man.”
“Too good.”
“Oh, Ffi.” Elen sighs, then she puts her hands on either side of Ffion’s face and drops a kiss on her forehead. “Now”—she stuffs her towel into a tote bag—“move those bloody boxes.”
Once the front door is closed, Ffion gets out her phone and looks at the last part of Leo’s message.
Will you have dinner with me?
She stares at the screen for the longest time, then puts the phone back in her pocket. Later. When she’s worked out what to say.
The house is quiet without Mam and Seren, who is almost certainly at The Shore with Caleb. Ffion wanders upstairs to find somewhere to store her books, but she’s already used every cupboard in the house. From her bedroom window, you can just see the lake—a shimmer of silver beyond the treetops—and Ffion stands and watches the sun dip beneath the mountain range. A scattering of fairy lights, like fallen stars, marks out the decks of The Shore.
Dee Huxley is sticking around, and Bobby Stafford is still smitten enough by Mia to do the same, but Yasmin Lloyd has accepted an offer on what the papers are callingthe murder lodge. The Charltons have separated, Blythe keeping number one as a holiday rental and yoga retreat, and the second phase of the development is now under way, with lodges springing up seemingly overnight. Ffion wonders who will buy them, how the new owners will fit in with the people of Cwm Coed.
Back downstairs, Ffion eyes up the boxes. They’ll have to go in the shed. She’ll need to move them before the winter, or the damp will get them, but at least it’ll get them out of Mam’s way. Elen Morgan doesn’t have a green thumb. Since Ffion’s dad died, the Morgans’ overgrown garden has been loved more by wildlife than by the neighbors on either side, who each boast neat strips of begonia-edged lawn.
Ffion pushes through swaths of oxeye daisies, sticky goosegrass clinging to her shorts. The shed is side-on to the house, the door warped so badly that it only closes with a kick. Ffion puts down the box and yanks it open. Inside is a muddle of tools, bags of dried-up compost, stacked plastic pots, and fertilizer long past its use-by date. She begins moving everything to one side to make space for the boxes.
A moment later, Ffion is wishing she’d never started. She contemplates how, if she had said yes to Huw, she would never have needed to set foot in this shed. That, really, she’s only here, among the rusty tools and the bags of compost, because she can’t stop thinking about Leo. She pulls out a bag, and the contents spill onto the floor in front of her. “This is all your bloody fault, Leo Brady,” she mutters. But as she bends down to pick the contents up, she realizes what she’s seeing. She sits down among the dirt and the spiders, suddenly light-headed.
This changes everything.
Sixty-Five
June
Ffion
Pen y Ddraig mountain looms high above Llyn Drych, the water shimmering in the early evening sun. A tiny boat tacks slowly from one side of the lake to the other. On the shore, a handful of day-trippers are barbecuing on piled stones, smoke and the smell of sausages drifting hazily into the warm air. Ffion looks for her mother.
Across the water, The Shore has doubled in size since last summer. The slope of the forest means the second row of lodges is higher than the first, although nothing could match the panoramic views of the front five properties. There are people on the middle deck—too small to make out—and as Ffion watches, someone dives from the pontoon, shallow and long.
Elen Morgan never swims with a safety float, and she shuns the brightly colored swim hats advised by the lake wardens. Like Angharad, she swims barefoot, seemingly unaffected by the sharp stones around the water’s edge.
Ffion scans the lake until she catches movement traveling from one buoy to another. Elen swims breaststroke, unhurried but faster than most. No splashy showmanship, just smooth, even strokes, low in the water. She is as much a part of the lake as the reeds that edge the coves, as the buoys that spend all year in the water, weeds clinging to their chains.
Ffion sits on the end of the jetty, letting her feet dangle in the cool water. Beside her is the black rubbish bag from the shed, and as Elen swims closer to the jetty, Ffion carefully arranges the contents of the bag. There’s a handful of photographs taken at the summer camp party, a note from Mia slipped into the envelope.Thought you and Ffion might like to see these. Trip down memory lane!Elen had not shared the photos with Ffion, and as Ffion looks through them now, she can see why. In every photo, Rhys is looking at Ffion, or Ffion is looking at him.
Elen Morgan knew Seren’s father had been at that party. These photographs had been enough to send her in search of proof.
Elen had sent for a DNA test. Wrapped in a plastic bag is an ebony hairbrush, the lettersRLetched on the back, and a folded piece of paper.
Rhys Lloyd is not excluded as the biological father of Seren Morgan. The probability of paternity is over 99 percent.
Even though it could be no other way, Ffion catches a sob in her throat. The paperwork is dated November last year. Elen had known Rhys was Seren’s father months before Ffion told her. Before Seren discovered the truth.
Ffion’s pulse is a drum in her ears as she watches Elen pierce the mirrored surface of the lake. She feels the beat in her toes as the water ebbs against her sunbaked skin. She pictures Rhys’s corpse on its stainless-steel bed.