فصل 23

CHAPTER 23

It was awkward getting out of Ezra’s car, and Hal stumbled, and as she did, she felt the tin slide from her back pocket and land with a thud on the gravel, spilling open.

“Damn!”

She bent, scrabbling up the feathered old cards before they were caught by the wind and whipped away.

Ezra slammed his door and came round her side of the car to help.

“Dropped something?” he asked, and then leaned down and picked up one of the cards, looking at it curiously. As he did, his face changed, almost as if he had seen a ghost, and then he seemed to catch hold of himself, and gave a laugh.

“Tarot!”

“It’s what I do,” Hal said shortly. There was a card slipped under the wheel of the Saab, and she tried to tease it out without ripping the edge on the gravel. “I’m a tarot reader on the pier in Brighton.” “No way!” He was laughing properly now. “Really? You kept that quiet.” “Not really.” She bent and peered under the chassis of the car. There were two more cards beneath, and she grabbed the first, but could not reach the second. “Could you—can you reach that card right in the middle there? Between the wheels?” Ezra bent and looked, and then stretched a long arm beneath the body of the car, scrabbling with his fingers.

“Got it.”

But when he stood, brushing himself off, and looked at the object he was holding, Hal saw that it wasn’t a card. It was the photograph that Abel had given her.

“Huh.” He held it in his hands for a moment, brushing a fragment of gravel off the fragile folds. “Where did you get this?” “Abel gave it to me.” Hal bit her lip. “He—he thought . . . he thought I might want it. Because I don’t have many photos of my mother.” “I see.” Ezra said nothing more, just stared down at the photograph, and Hal saw his thumb very gently brush the face of his sister, sitting beside him, laughing at him. “You—” He swallowed painfully. “You must miss her.” “Yes. Yes, I do.”

Her throat hurt with the truth of it. Time healed, they said, but it wasn’t true, or not completely. The first raw wound of loss had closed and silvered over, yes, but the scar it had left would never heal. It would always be there, aching and tender.

Ezra brushed again at an imaginary speck of sand, and then, almost reluctantly, Hal thought, he handed the picture to her with a smile that held something of her own barely covered grief.

“I do too,” he said. And then he turned and headed into the house, as though there were nothing more he could bear to say.