“This doesn’t change anything, you know,” Heather said eventually. “It doesn’t change who you are, or what you did.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.” He turned to look at her, and not for the first time Heather felt a shiver of discomfort; it was as though he looked straight to the heart of her. As though he could see down to her bones.
“What is it?”
“I was just thinking.” He smiled, that rueful almost-smile made so famous by his mugshot. “I was just thinking that Colleen should have given me you, instead of Lyle. There’s so much more of me in you.”
It was spring. The dog roses on the cliff path were all in bloom, their soft pink and yellow heads nodding in the freshening sea breeze. Heather brushed her fingers against the petals as she passed them, plucking one or two blooms and thinking of nothing in particular until she came to the cliff’s edge. Yawning away below her was the drop, and the solid blue sea—the last thing her mother had ever seen, probably.
Colleen Evans had been faced with a terrible decision—the worst decision, perhaps, that anyone could have to make—and, ultimately, she hadn’t been able to live with it. Certainly not when the Bickerstaff sisters had come sniffing around her door, not when the time had come for the dark harvest of Fiddler’s Wood. Such a decision had broken her, twisted her into something sharp and cold, and Heather wondered if Lyle, sitting in his prison cell, deserved to know that: if he deserved to know how it had broken their mother, to give him to the monsters. She thought, all in all, that it was a mercy he hadn’t earned. However small a mercy it was.
“I think I’m more like you, actually.” She said it forcefully, but the wind picked up her words and snatched them out to sea. “I really do think that. I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner, Mum.” A seagull cried overhead, a clear and hopeful sound. “I’m sorry.”
Heather scattered the dog rose petals where she stood and walked away from the cliff’s edge.
Also available by Jen Williams
The Winnowing Flame Trilogy
The Poison Song
The Bitter Twins
The Ninth Rain
The Copper Cat Trilogy
The Silver Tide
The Iron Ghost
The Copper Promise
Short Story
Sorrow’s Isle
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jen Williams lives in London with her partner and their small ridiculous cat. Having been a fan of grisly fairy tales from a young age, these days Jen writes dark unsettling thrillers with strong female leads, as well as character–driven fantasy novels with plenty of adventure and magic. She has twice won the British Fantasy Award for her Winnowing Flame trilogy, and when she’s not writing books she works as a bookseller and a freelance copywriter.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Jen Williams
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-574-5
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-575-2
Cover design by Nicole Lecht
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
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First Edition: June 2021
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