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Chapter 1
Chapter One: A Village Holding Its Breath
Grindle was the sort of village you could walk all the way out of in four minutes, if you walked quickly and nobody stopped you to ask how your family was doing.
Everybody stopped Hattie Dowling now.
She had learned to walk with her chin down and her hands in her pockets, past the shop, past the bus shelter with the broken bench, past Mrs Pinnock arranging carrots as though carrots mattered. If she kept moving, people only got as far as, "Hattie, love —" and then she was gone, out along the lane where the hedges gave up and the sky opened, down to where Sedge Creek slid out of the fields and spread itself into the marsh.
The marsh was the best thing about Grindle. It was miles of grey-green reeds and silver channels and mud that sucked at your boots and made a rude noise when it let go. Curlews walked about in it on legs like bent wire. At the far edge, where the land finally admitted it was losing to the sea, stood the old railway halt: one short platform, one wooden shelter with no roof left worth mentioning, and one small brick hut with a door that had been locked since before Hattie's mum was born.
LOST PROPERTY, said the sign. The paint had faded to the colour of weak tea.
Nobody had opened that hut in fifty years. Hattie and her brother had spent whole summers deciding what was inside it. A stuffed crocodile. A crown. Forty-one umbrellas and one very cross cat. They used to press their faces to the little dusty window and argue about it until their noses went numb.
Hattie did not press her face to the window any more.
It had been six weeks since the accident. Six weeks and two days, which she knew exactly, because she had a list for it.
Hattie had always made lists of found things. It was her particular habit, the way some people bite their nails. Feathers, mostly, and interesting stones, and the odd coin. Since the accident the lists had grown enormous. She wrote them in a school exercise book with a bent corner, in her smallest handwriting, and she wrote every single day.
FOUND, WEDNESDAY:
one blue button, four holes
half a crab claw
a plastic dinosaur, tail missing
a shoelace
a feather (herring gull, grubby)
The list was a good thing to think about because it was not any of the other things.
At home, the house had gone quiet in a way that houses aren't supposed to. Mum drove forty minutes to the county hospital and forty minutes back, every day, and came in with her coat still on and fell asleep in the armchair with the telly talking to nobody. Dad phoned from a boat somewhere out at the wind farm, where the crew changeovers were fixed and the weather was worse than the forecast, and his voice came down the line all crackly and too cheerful. Four more weeks, Hats. Three more weeks. I'm counting.
And Nanna Ruby had moved into the empty bedroom.
Nanna Ruby was seventy-six and had arrived with three coats, a walking stick she refused to lean on, and an old biscuit tin full of buttons. She called Hattie by the wrong name at least twice a day — Julie, which was Mum's name, or sometimes just "you" in a tone that made you stand up straighter. But about everything else she was sharper than any grown-up in the village. She knew when the tide turned without looking at a tide table. She knew when Hattie hadn't eaten. She knew, Hattie was fairly sure, that Hattie was not sleeping much.
What nobody knew was the thing Hattie had said.
She had not told the doctors, or Mum, or Dad on the crackly phone. She had not written it on any list. It lived behind her ribs like a stone swallowed by mistake, and it woke her up at three in the morning, and it made her unable — actually, physically unable — to say her brother's name out loud.
She could say "my brother." She could say "him."
But the name got stuck somewhere in her throat, and stayed there, and stared at her.
