The Way The Light Bends

By Lorraine Wilson

Sometimes hope is the most dangerous thing of all.

When their brother dies, two sisters lose the one thing that connected them. But then a year after her twin's death, Tamsin goes missing.

Despite police indifference and her husband's doubts, Freya is determined to find her sister. But a trail of diary en

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913387198

Lorraine Wilson

Lorraine Wilson writes flirty, feel-good fiction for One More Chapter – a division of HarperCollins – and is unashamedly fond of happy endings.She splits her time between the South of France and is usually either writing or reading while being sat on, walked over or barked at by one of her growing band of rescue dogs. You can find her online either via her website: www.lorraine-wilson.com or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/LorraineWilsonWriter and Twitter @Romanceminx

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The Way

The Light Bends

Lorraine Wilson

Text Copyright 2022 Lorraine Wilson

Cover 2022 © Jay Johnstone

First published by Luna Press Publishing, Edinburgh, 2022

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

Extract from: The Stolen Child by W. B. Yeats—1865-1939—Public Domain

The right of Lorraine Wilson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record is available from the British Library

www.lunapresspublishing.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-913387-19-8

To Mum and Jennifer.

For reading all my terrible first drafts,

for believing right from the start.

Chapter One

Tamsin

April 2016

Today we buried my twin.

It rained in the graveyard like the clouds were pressing down on our faces, on our black clothes, and soaking into our bones. We hid him in the earth and spoke platitudes over him that are somehow meant to help; but the world is still broken, and Rob is still dead.

I write the words, and they make no sense to me. My body rejects them, the bones of my fingers splinter as they bend around each letter. But I can’t stop. I am ... I don’t know what I am, or who. How can I be Tamsin without Rob, and how can writing it down do any good at all? But I can’t stop.

Freya

March 2017

Freya was not angry. She set her phone down on the desk, pushed it away from her with the very tips of her fingers, and held her breath for several long seconds before releasing it.

She was not angry at Tamsin, she repeated to herself, and besides it was nearly half-past twelve. Pushing to her feet, grateful for the need to move, Freya smoothed her skirt and ran a hand over her hair. From her office tucked away in the back, she could not hear anything of the shop-floor itself, but the screen in the corner showed greyscale fish-eyed images of clothes racks, mannequins in frozen improbability, and the slow hanger-flicking browse of a couple of customers. She would check the new stock before her meeting, she decided, so that she could go fully armed.

But the sound of her phone caught her half-way out of the door, and although she knew it would not be Tamsin, Freya jumped for it all the same. It was their mother.

‘Mum, hi.’ Freya looked at the clock automatically, stifling a tiny, petty irritation. This was the second phone-call today, but it was to be expected just now, of course it was, and Freya sat back down.

‘Hello darling.’ Anne Pettigrew sounded faintly relieved, as if in this last year she bore a constant fear for her daughters. As if every absence and every missed phone-call was a moment of heartbreak or of terror. ‘Are you busy?’

‘No, Mum. What’s the matter?’

‘Have you heard from Tamsin?’

‘Not yet.’ The muscles between Freya’s eyebrows tightened and she rubbed a thumb over them absently. ‘You know what she’s like.’

A pause. This was where, a year ago, her mother would have asked, Are you coming to see Rob after work? And Freya would say, Yes. Of course. Or perhaps, I can’t tonight, Mum. Rufus invited some friends around for dinner. Tell him I’ll be there tomorrow, okay?

They both heard the words in the hissing hollow of the phone-line. They both stayed silent, listening to them. It was Freya who spoke first.

‘She’ll be there, Mum.’ Because the alternative was inconceivable, even for Tamsin. Especially for Tamsin.

‘I meant to ask...’ Anne began, leaving Freya’s assertion hanging.

Freya waited, watching the CCTV as a customer at the till wrestled with her purse and two bags. ‘What, Mum?’

‘I ... were you thinking of bringing cut flowers, you know, for his ... for the grave? It’s just, it occurred to me that we don’t want too many, do we? They only... I hate going back and...’ The phone-line filled with echoes again.

Freya pressed the tips of thumb and forefinger into her eyes, careful of her makeup. ‘I know, Mum.’ She took a breath. ‘Shall I pop round after work and we can decide what we want to take?’

‘Oh, no, Freya. There’s no need for that. You probably have something on.’

She didn’t. Rufus was on a late shift this week, and so he would come home after midnight, shower the long hours and smell of hospitals from his skin and kiss her shoulder before falling asleep without speaking. ‘I’ll come by, it’s okay.’ She brushed a half-imagined speck of lint from her skirt. ‘I’ve a meeting in Perth so I can stop by on the way home. But I must head to that now, Mum. Sorry.’

The drive from St. Andrews to Perth took longer than usual so that Freya arrived at the managers’ meeting in a rush and only once seated, with others still milling around the refreshments table, did she become aware of a low, sharp ache in the cradle of her pelvis that heralded a period. She pressed one hand against her stomach and would not allow herself to acknowledge that tiny flash of ... not loss, because they weren’t even trying, and that was too simple an emotion anyway. Regret? A minuscule loneliness?

Silly really, because she’d decided an age and a career level at which she’d be ready, and she hadn’t reached either yet. Silly too, that she could feel anything approximating sorrow for something so small when every day was still strewn with bear-traps of grief.

Her phone buzzed to an incoming message, and the fact that it was not Tamsin, the annoyance that it still wasn’t Tamsin, erased all traces of that not-quite-feeling from Freya’s mind. It was Rufus, reminding her that the McAllisters were coming to dinner the next evening. That he’d picked up some wine on the way to work, so she didn’t need to.

She had planned to cook fish. But inexplicably the thought of having to handle those bodies, their dead eyes dented, turned her stomach now. She’d have to think of something else that would go with the wine Rufus had bought. It might have to be chicken.

The meeting began and Freya sent another text to her sister without expecting a response.

‘Where’s Dad?’ Freya asked her mum six hours later, taking her coat and shoes off in the porch and pushing Jaspar’s welcoming nose away from her legs as she did so.

‘Golf,’ Anne said. ‘He’ll probably eat at the club. Are you hungry? I was just about to have a glass of wine, do you want one?’ They hugged briefly with the dog between their legs and Freya tried not to feel the lines of her mother’s bones. Grief had stripped mass from her when cancer consumed her son, hollowed her out until she seemed translucent, weightless.

‘Driving home, Mum. I can’t.’ A generational mental blank, Freya knew, and tried not to be annoyed by it. Because she would have loved a glass, actually, she would have loved to be home already, sinking into her own sofa with her empty house around her like a cocoon.

They reached the kitchen, James’ newspaper still open on the breakfast table and the dog returning to his basket with a sigh. Her mum poured herself a white wine, setting a second back onto its shelf, the overhead lights catching the silver in her neat blonde hair. Freya could look into that serene, strained face and see her own, thirty years ahead. She would grow those same lines around her eyes, her hair would turn to grey in the same near-invisible way. Rob would have been similar, ageing exactly like their father, gold-tinted. Tamsin would be like neither.

‘Katie Baird is on her second round of IVF – had you heard? Poor girl.’

‘Yes,’ Freya said, aware of the day in the muscles of her shoulders, the impending date rushing towards her like a storm and let it be over, she thought for the hundredth time. Let it pass, so that it has been more than a year.

‘I wonder if Tamsin will have children,’ Anne said, sipping from her wine and then replacing the glass exactly where it had been, so many things unspoken. ‘Although god alone knows what sort of person the father will turn out to be!’

‘Mum!’ Freya laughed. Not shocked, but still... ‘She’s not like that! And anyway, she’s single.’ As far as she knew, which did not mean an awful lot.

Her mother put her hand on the counter, rings tapping sharply against stone as the kettle began to boil. ‘Oh, I know. I know. I was only wondering.’ The threat of tears was present like a warning flag and Freya knew her mum was thinking of grandsons, perhaps Tamsin’s in particular. Again, that twinge of pain, her body missing something her mind did not want. Almost did not. She wished she could say that even if Tamsin had sons, even if she had a dozen, even if Freya had them, none of them would be Rob.

Instead, and almost tangentially, she said, ‘I’m hoping to make Regional Manager this year, maybe next. I could work part-time once I’m not store-based, without taking a demotion.’

‘Oh, careers.’ You wouldn’t have thought she’d had one herself from the way she spoke, but she was smiling, handing over a mug of tea that Freya held beneath her nose, the steam scouring her eyes, her cheekbones, seeing through it a ghost-version of the mother that had been missing for nearly two years.

‘I like working,’ she said. A career and a child, two, Rufus as a consultant. Everything she wanted.

‘You’ll get there soon, I know it. You’ve got it all under control. Tamsin’s my worry, my wild child, not you.’

‘And Rob?’ Freya asked, each millimetre of her smile like a yardstick of how well she was coping. ‘What was he?’

A pause. ‘Robbie was my sunshine.’

And so where were they all now, Freya thought, without that?

She got away after an hour. ‘I’ll see you on Friday then, Mum,’ she said. Repeating the hug farewell, patting Jasper on his upturned head. Friday. The twenty-sixth of March. One year since Rob’s death. Three hundred and sixty-five days without her brother.

‘I hope it doesn’t rain,’ her mum said. Looking past Freya to the sky through the open door, as if the clouds now would tell her what they might do in three days’ time. It had been raining on the day of the funeral. So much of that day was drowned in Freya’s memory by the effort it had taken to retain her self-control. But she remembered the rain.

Tamsin

April 2016

He wanted to be cremated. Rob wanted to be cremated and have his ashes thrown into the sea in the middle of a winter storm.

‘But don’t tell the folks,’ he’d said to me. ‘They’ll want it done all traditional, Tams. And I guess I won’t be in any state to care by that point, so let them do what they want.’

‘You know it really sucks, talking like this.’ I was sitting alongside him, perilously balanced on his hospice bed. I’d felt his shrug against my own shoulder, his weariness with pretending. ‘I could push your bike into the sea instead,’ I offered, half joking. ‘In a storm, if you really want. Although if I get washed in too, I’ll come and haunt you.’

‘Can you haunt a ghost?’ Rob asked, then added thoughtfully, ‘Yeah, do that. I like it. New age Viking.’

‘You want me to set fire to it as well?’

A laugh, although it barely counted as one. The cancer had eaten away at him by then until he was left with only this. A slow-syncopated breath.

‘Yeah, do that.’ He paused and I waited. Sometimes it was the pain, sometimes it was the drugs, I waited a lot these days. ‘I don’t ... Sheepy, I wish you could come with me.’

The old nickname, the one only he ever used, hit me hard. Suttee, I thought. The choice between the fire or abandonment. I wish you could come with me.

‘Do you really think I want to stay?’ I said quietly. ‘I will come, Bobs. I’ll come with you.’

More silence. Shadows on the ceiling, and the fear in his eyes was the worst thing in the world.

‘I know,’ he said slowly. ‘But not yet, Tams.’

This time he waited for me, and I would have promised him anything just then, even this. ‘Not yet,’ I agreed.

Two promises in place of goodbyes.

He was right, of course. Our parents had the full thing. Church service and burial in an old graveyard surrounded by stone walls and yew trees, full of ghosts. There is something so very Rob in that he got to be right even after he was dead.

I didn’t listen to the vicar’s words, because Rob had not believed and so he’d not be listening now, either. And in the graveyard, in the rain, I watched the flicker-movements of blackbirds beneath the trees, a crow perched on a headstone eyeing us darkly.

I cried and the clouds cried. And I despised every single person standing around Rob’s bland coffin, simply because they were alive.

Freya caught my eye and gestured for me to go and stand with them. Her, Rufus – Wufus – Mum and Dad. But we shared too much DNA just then, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move or look at their faces or the colour of their eyes. I had Evie instead, her hand held mine like an anchor, and Dab, Shona, Twitch and Kyle, my friends surrounded me like the sea.

Dad cried, his eyes red and unblinking, his arm around our mother’s shoulder as solid as stone, and Freya ... Freya was something from a movie. New black dress, one hand on the arm of her handsome husband, her face like ivory and the rain making her pale hair the colour of water. She hasn’t shed a tear, not that I’ve seen and it shouldn’t make me furious, but it does.

The rain made my vision strange, drugged, mutating all those familiar figures into fox heads and hawk eyes and a cat slow-blinking, a snake hooded and poised, a wolf smiling. Rob is dead, and everyone left alive is a monster.

Chapter Two

Freya

March 2017

Rufus made Freya a cup of tea on the Friday of Rob’s anniversary, and suggested she took the day off.

‘Call in sick, honey,’ he said, eyeing her over his propped-up tablet screen, one hand resting lightly over hers on the tabletop. ‘Everyone knows how hard today will be. No-one expects you to go in.’

He didn’t understand. ‘I’ve a conference call with the marketing team at HQ this morning,’ she said. ‘I can’t miss that. It’s about the re-branding.’

He shrugged, flicked a finger across the screen in front of him. ‘I’m sure they’d reschedule.’

They might, if they had to, but it would be noted. Freya Masterson? St. Andrews branch? Oh yes, bit erratic, don’t you think? Some family thing, I heard. But still.

It was hard for him, she understood that. Hard to see significance in the management of a clothes shop when his days were filled with blood and broken lives. Hard for him not to be dismissive, particularly after frustrating shifts, or terrible ones. It was one of the truths of being married to a doctor, or a nurse, that nothing you ever did would be as important as what they did, every day. Apart from motherhood perhaps. New life.

Freya made a noise that could have been agreement, if he wanted to hear that, and drank the last of her tea. She needed to be going, the new trainee had her second shift today and Freya needed to speak to her before opening.

‘You’ll be on time?’ she said, leaning down to Rufus for a kiss.

Studying her face meticulously, he said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Catching her look and amending himself, ‘I’ll do my best, honey.’

She smiled, amazed at being able to do so when her face was already stiffening into something frozen, android-esque that would get her through the next ten hours.

The truth was if Freya had taken the day off, she’d have spent it with her parents, every minute parameterised by Rob and his absence and the three hundred and sixty-five days that they had spent missing him.

The truth was she couldn’t bear it. Selfishly and guiltily, she couldn’t bear to spend so much time watching the fraying edges of her mother’s courage, braving her father’s silences. Far easier to talk about colour schemes and dynamics, to file paperwork for the trainee’s pay. To deal with only her own ragged fortitude for a while.

Aside from one thing.

Tamsin’s mobile went to answer-phone again, and Freya’s equilibrium wavered.

‘Tamsin,’ she said, straining to sound calm, ‘it’s Freya. Today’s the twenty-sixth. I have to assume you got my previous messages but just haven’t bothered to let me know. Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you but make sure you’re at the church later, okay? This is not about you, Tamsin, it’s about supporting Mum and Dad.’

Eerily, it was almost what Tamsin had said to her, a year and ten months ago. She’d called asking Freya to come to their parents that evening, and Freya had said she couldn’t. She and Rufus were going to friends for a dinner that had been planned for weeks.

‘Just come,’ Tamsin had said. Sounding frail and tired and not at all like herself. ‘Just make sure you’re there, even for half an hour. Mum and Dad will need you. Please, Freya.’

She’d gone, because her sister’s voice had set amorphous fears crashing around in her head. She’d gone and perched on her parents’ new sofa with Tamsin and Rob opposite, mirror-imaged, two faces of one coin, dark and light like some ancient symbolism with the dog stretched contentedly across their feet.

Then Rob had spoken, and the world changed.

Everything divided into before and after, pivoting around that one moment and those words. More so even than his death, because they had been losing him for months by then, grieving him for months.

‘Guys,’ he’d said, ‘there’s no easy way to tell you this, so...’ A two-shouldered shrug, Tamsin shifting her weight so that her elbow touched his. He was looking at their mum when he said it. ‘I’ve got cancer.’

Rob, Freya thought, a year and ten months later. Oh, Robbie, why did it have to be you? My sunshine, their mum had said.

Mine too, Freya thought.

Rufus was late, and Tamsin didn’t show up at all.

Freya and her parents stood by the lych-gate watching for Rufus, none of them complaining because this too was life with a doctor, this was part of the deal. And besides, none of them were really waiting for Rufus, they were waiting for Tamsin.

‘It isn’t raining, at least,’ Freya said at one point. There was a cool wind setting all the trees moving, cascades of blossom petals in the air and Freya would have thought them beautiful if they did not remind her, just at that moment, of tears. A single magpie landed on the apex of the chapel, tilting its head as if it too were waiting, and Freya turned her shoulder so that she could no longer see it.

‘It’s a lovely day,’ Anne said. ‘Poor Rufus, I hope he’s not driving too fast.’

His car came into the car-park just then, on a tidal wave of gravel that suggested he had been doing exactly that, and only her relief told Freya how alone she’d felt without him there.

‘She’s not coming, Anne,’ Freya’s father said. ‘We may as well go on. Hullo, Rufus. Bugger of a drive, this time of day.’

Rufus slid an arm around Freya and she leaned against him very slightly. He smelt of handwash and fatigue. ‘That it is, James,’ he said. ‘That it is. Hello, Anne, those are lovely flowers. Sorry to hold you up, emergency admission.’ He raised an eyebrow inquisitively at Freya and interpreting her grimace, said, ‘Shall we go in? If Tamsin makes it, she can join us.’

They moved out of the muted shade of the lych-gate roof and something stretched taut in Freya, relaxed. She looked over her shoulder at the archway, lichen on the roof tiles and old timbers sculpted by a hundred winters and ten thousand brushing hands. It was darker beneath the eaves than it had looked when she stood under them, and above, the magpie took off, cackling, its shadow preceding it beyond the graves.

Rob lay in the newer graveyard, young yew trees and metal benches, long stretches of empty grass that Freya couldn’t bring herself to look at. There was something terrible about those blank spaces, the earth waiting for offerings like a hungry god.

‘Hello, Rob, darling,’ Anne said. She came here often, Freya knew. At least once a week to tidy fallen leaves, remove scraps of confetti or cigarette butts that always seemed to gather against his headstone. She said that it helped her through the rest of the week, to have this time when she was allowed to do nothing but miss her son.

Freya knelt beside her and watched her mother’s fingers arrange daffodils in the vase, pull tiny tufts of grass away from emerging leaves. ‘Those are the tulips we planted,’ she said, surprised and pleased, the jewel-green furls rising up like messages from Rob, or from themselves when grief had been six months fresher.

‘It will look lovely when they flower,’ Anne said. ‘Here, hand me those.’ Freya yielded up the two pots of grape hyacinth she’d been holding. They were unusual, the tight heads of flowers indigo at the top, fading to white at the bottom. She imagined that Rob might like the fact that they were different. God knows, he hardly cared much for flowers, so why they were doing this escaped her.

For themselves, she supposed. ‘That looks nice, mum.’

‘A whole year,’ her mum said, her hands settling into her lap, fingers interlacing. ‘Surely it was only yesterday he was my wee boy, the two of them always up to something, always filthy.’ She made a soft sound that was only part-laughter. ‘Do you remember the time when he painted his hair?’

‘To look like Tamsin,’ Freya said and then wished she hadn’t.

‘It took forever to wash out,’ Anne said, her voice fading away like a signal being lost.

Freya said nothing else until she was sure she could do so without her voice breaking. She took her mum’s hand in hers, feeling the softness of her skin, the movement of rings on fingers grown thin. ‘I miss him too,’ she said. But the awful thing was that she hated this, this immersion into memory, and it didn’t matter whether it was him as a boy or as a teenager, or a young man, healthy or sick. Any of it, all of it was too much like drowning, and Freya did not dare drown. It was far safer to parse the memories down into fragments so that she could ration them, and cope.

‘I know it is hard for her, but I wish Tamsin had come,’ Anne said.

Behind them, Freya’s father said something in an undertone to Rufus and Freya wished her mother shared his anger, wished she was mad at her youngest child for being so selfish, so blindly self-absorbed as to fail to be here for this, for them. Better that than this demure hurt, because anger would absolve Freya of responsibility, it would free her to be angry for herself, abandoned by the one person who should have shared this with her.

‘I’m going to kill her,’ she said to Rufus, in the car. ‘The self-centred little cow. I’m going to strangle her.’

‘Leave it,’ he said evenly. ‘She’s not worth it.’

Tamsin

April 2016

Two days after his funeral, eleven days since he died, I went to our parents to collect his motorbike. Freya was there, helping with some paperwork; no-one told me what it was and I didn’t ask. They looked at me like I was mad.

‘You don’t ride a motorbike,’ Freya said, all of them following me out to the garage.

‘It’s far too heavy for you,’ our mother said and she was right, Freya was wrong. I’d ridden it before, taken Rob out after he became too weak to drive it himself. ‘Go faster,’ he’d whisper into my helmet. ‘We’re alright, go faster.’ And I did. The nights kaleidoscopic and feverish as if we were trying to outrace time and the entire the world, Rob laughing at the sky. Once, when we were almost home, he rested his head against my back and wept. I kept driving, round and around Perth’s streets in the endless dark, letting him cry.

‘I’m taking it,’ I said again. I was not going to try explaining why, keeping the promises I’d made like secrets, and what good would it do to talk about last wishes when it was already too late.

Dad turned his back to us all, sorting through tools and a random assortment of engine parts as if he knew what he was looking at. Perhaps he did. They didn’t argue any more, and Freya’s face changed, the skin over her bones taut as a drum. She thought I might be going to sell it. She thought I’d ... Let her think it, even if it leaves my mouth tasting of metal and vinegar. It doesn’t matter what she thinks, I am not doing this for her.

I took the bike and his spare keys, and brought it home. Now I’m waiting for a storm.

Freya

March 2017

Freya went to Tamsin’s flat before work on the day after the anniversary. So soon because she’d woken long before the alarm, hot-wired into wakefulness by an anger not even slightly diluted by sleep.

‘You’d better have an absolutely stunning reason,’ she muttered to herself on the road heading inland from St. Andrews to Cupar. ‘You’d better be in prison, or stuck under a wardrobe, or ... or sick...’ Swerving away from that thought the moment she said it. ‘Jury duty,’ she amended. ‘Kidnapped. Tied up by some gimp boyfriend