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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Photograph
Poppy Atherton noticed things.
She noticed that the postbox on Harbour Lane leaned exactly three degrees to the left. She noticed that Mrs. Keeling's cat always sat on the same windowsill at precisely four o'clock. She noticed that the seagulls in Cawsford flew in wider circles on Tuesdays, which was bin day, because there was more rubbish to investigate.
Most people in the village thought Poppy noticed too much. Her teacher, Mr. Gifford, said she needed to "focus on what matters." Her classmates said she was weird. Her older sister, Jude, said she was embarrassing.
But Poppy's mother, Francine, said that noticing things was a superpower. "The world is full of people who walk around with their eyes shut," she told Poppy once, while they were sorting sea glass by colour on the kitchen table. "You're not one of them."
Poppy was eleven years old. She had dark brown hair that she wore in two plaits because loose hair touching her neck made her skin crawl. She wore the same green jumper almost every day because it was the exact right softness, and she kept a small notebook in her pocket where she wrote down things she noticed. The notebook was nearly full.
On the Tuesday that everything changed, Poppy was in the Cawsford Public Library, which was her favourite place in the world after the rock pools at Merrin Point. The library smelled like old paper and wood polish, and the lights hummed at a frequency that Poppy found soothing rather than irritating, which was unusual for fluorescent lights.
She was looking for a book about coastal wildflowers when a photograph fell out from between the pages of a heavy volume called *Native Plants of the Southwest Coast*.
The photograph was faded and slightly bent at one corner. It showed a group of children—five of them—standing in a garden bursting with flowers. Hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds, and others Poppy couldn't identify rose up behind them like a living wall of colour. The children were smiling. Two of them held watering cans. One girl, who looked about Poppy's age, had her hand resting on the head of a small dog.
Poppy turned the photograph over. On the back, in pencil that had faded almost to nothing, someone had written: *Brennick Lane Garden, Cawsford, Summer 1953.*
Brennick Lane. Poppy knew that name. It was the narrow road that ran behind the library, the one that ended at the overgrown plot surrounded by a chain-link fence. The plot was full of brambles and litter now. There was a faded sign on the fence that read: PROPERTY OF CAWSFORD DISTRICT COUNCIL. NO TRESPASSING.
Poppy stared at the photograph for a long time. The garden in the picture and the wasteland behind the fence were the same place. But what had happened to all the flowers? And who were these children?
She tucked the photograph carefully into her notebook and went to find Mrs. Partridge, the librarian.
"Mrs. Partridge," Poppy said, placing the photograph on the counter. "This fell out of a book. Do you know anything about a garden on Brennick Lane?"
Mrs. Partridge was a round woman with reading glasses that hung on a beaded chain. She picked up the photograph and squinted at it.
"Oh," she said softly. "I haven't seen this in years." She was quiet for a moment. "That was the Traveller garden, love. Before my time, really, but my mother talked about it. A group of Traveller families used to live along Brennick Lane. They kept that garden beautifully."
"What happened to them?" Poppy asked.
"They were moved on," Mrs. Partridge said carefully. "In the fifties. The council decided they didn't want Travellers living so close to the village centre. There was a vote, and the families were told to leave."
"That's not fair," Poppy said.
Mrs. Partridge looked at her over her glasses. "No," she agreed. "It wasn't."
Poppy walked home along the seafront with the photograph in her notebook and a tight, hot feeling in her chest. She had learned a new word recently: *injustice*. It meant when something was unfair in a way that was bigger than just one person. It was the kind of unfair that got built into rules and laws and stayed there, even after everyone pretended to forget about it.
The overgrown plot behind the library was an injustice. Poppy was sure of it.
And she was going to do something about it.
