Katherine Graham
Salt Sisters
What secrets is this seaside village hiding?
First published by Quartz Books 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Katherine Graham
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise withoutwritten permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distributeit by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it arethe work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localitiesis entirely coincidental.
First edition
ISBN: 978-1-8383195-1-9
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For Beth – my lifelong best friend from the very beginning.
And Igor, my North Star. You made it all possible.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Chapter One
We got off the plane and walked into the airport terminal, where I promptly threw up.
The river of passengers diverted as people shuffled and side-stepped around my puddle of vomit. I pressed my face against the cool of the tiled wall.
‘There, there.’ My best friend Adam rubbed my back, glancing nervously about.
A combination of vodka and sleeping pills had knocked me out right after take-off from Hong Kong. I’d blacked out for the entire flight, drowning in a deep sleep where I couldn’t dream and couldn’t wake. Couldn’t picture Amy’s face clearly.
The last leg of the journey was in sight and the closer we got to home, the higher the waves of nausea rose in my chest. Every so often I had to stop and rest against a seat or grab a handrail and close my eyes to avoid being sucked under the swell, taking deep breaths and riding it out until it washed away. The floor was unsteady beneath my feet.
‘Just give me a moment,’ I said.
Adam had taken care of everything. He had packed my suitcase while I lay on the bed, swinging between body-racking sobs and staring silently at the wall, while his husband Thierry had pulled some strings to get us two seats in business class on the next flight to Heathrow.
Was that only yesterday? It already felt like a lifetime ago. Yesterday morning, when everything had been normal, when I’d woken up and drunk my coffee like normal. I should have gone to Pilates and met friends for brunch, just like any other Saturday. Maybe spent the afternoon shopping. But then I’d checked my messages and my world had imploded.
Soon, we were in the hire car motoring up the A1, my forehead resting on the passenger window. Life was inexplicably continuing. People were making journeys, running errands, going for days out. Going on as if nothing had happened. The sun was offensively bright.
I was drowsy, and despite sleeping for twelve hours straight, I was exhausted. My head pounded and my body ached with the effort of just sitting.
We turned off the motorway and onto narrow roads bracketed by tall hedgerows, and my internal GPS flickered to life: I knew these country lanes like the lines on my hands. Adam was taking the tight corners cautiously, but I would have been whizzing through.
The sea was just coming into sight – we got a glimpse here and there as we swung around narrow bends – and I knew that under different circumstances I would have been stretching in my seat by now, craning my neck to see it. Instead, there was a quiet dread, that sick feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t shake, and a heaviness that wouldn’t go away.
We finally arrived at the village. Seahouses was little more than two dozen streets knotted together above a harbour that opened up onto the vast blue of the North Sea. I directed Adam to Amy’s house, a detached stone cottage that had been the village post office at one time. He pulled up outside and switched off the engine, looking at me to see what was next. It was so quiet.
This was really happening. I would never see my sister again. Never speak to her, or hear her voice.
We had shared an entire life and for years, we had come strictly as a pair. Amy was the only person who had been there since the beginning, who truly knew me. But then there were all the things we’d never got to say. And now the years ahead of us, the decades stretching in front that we had taken for granted, all that time had been so abruptly and cruelly cancelled.
Everything that we would ever do together, all of it was already done. It was only me from now on.
We stood on the doorstep, and I asked Adam to give me a moment. I had to pull myself together – the last thing I wanted to do was to collapse in tears the second I saw the kids. But the longer I thought about them, just on the other side of the door, the higher my panic grew – how would they cope without their mum?
The shock was rising once more, beating in my chest and tightening its hands around my throat. I leaned against the door frame, trying to catch my breath. Adam sniffed loudly, and I knew he was trying to hold back his tears.
Eventually I raised a hand to knock, but before I could, the door opened.
‘My darling girl!’ Auntie Sue wailed, opening her arms for me.
I
