Ray shakes his head.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I told your old man exactly what happened. I told him about your mum standing frozen on the beach – we found out later she was in deep shock, it can do that you know, make you immobile – and I told him that you’d run through the waves and got to David first. I told him how you had him in your arms and that you said you were keeping him warm. But your dad, he was a troubled man, Kate. Your brother’s death was senseless and he needed someone to blame. He took what I’d told him and it got all jumbled and warped in his mind, I guess.’
‘So Dad chose to believe that I drowned David while Mum just stood and watched,’ I say, shivering as I remember the venom on my father’s face whenever he looked at Mum or me.
‘As I said,’ says Ray softly, ‘he was a troubled man.’
We sit for a moment, not speaking, barely breathing, as the past flutters then settles around us.
‘Thank you, Ray,’ I say, puncturing the silence. ‘Thank you for being there.’
‘You don’t have to thank me,’ he says. ‘All I want is to see you happy; to put all this heartache behind you and go and live your life. There’s been too much pain in your family. Make it end, eh?’
I nod my head and we sit in silence for what seems like a lifetime.
‘I’d better go,’ I say finally as I get up from the table. ‘I’m leaving with Sally’s daughter and grandson.’
‘Good,’ he says, smiling warmly. ‘A new start is what you all need. But before you go I want to say something.’
‘Okay,’ I say, sitting down again.
‘What happened that day at the beach was the worst thing I have ever lived through. Laying your little brother out in my boat and desperately trying to revive him . . . I had nightmares for months afterwards. Horrible nightmares that wouldn’t leave me alone.’
He has had the nightmares too. I understand.
‘But do you know what eased them?’ he says, pressing his hand into mine. ‘Do you know what got me through?’
I shake my head.
‘It was the memory of those few minutes,’ he says. ‘When the sun was shining and I’d just set up my line and I heard the sound of laughter. And it reassured me to know that in his final moments David was happy; he was playing in the waves with his big sister.’
Tears run down my face as I stand up from the table.
Ray gets up and hugs me. He hugs me like my father should have all those years ago.
‘They will stop,’ he whispers. ‘The nightmares. I promise you they will.’
I leave Ray in the cafe and make my way out. But before I head back to the hospital I stand for a moment on the shingle and look out to sea. And as I breathe the last of the day’s air into my lungs and listen to the faint moan of the seabirds I feel something leave me. It is subtle, barely discernible, like the tickle of a feather across a sleeper’s face, but I know what it is as I turn to go. My brother, the boy I tried to save, has said goodbye.
Epilogue
The little boy squeals as the plane begins its descent and I lean across the seat and take his hand.
‘This is exciting, isn’t it, David?’
He nods his head and smiles a beautiful, beaming smile. When Sally was a child we used to say that her smile was like the sun coming out and as I sit holding her little grandson’s hand I feel something of her spirit around us. She will live on through this little boy.
Hannah opens the blind and looks out.
‘Just a few moments and we’ll see it,’ she says.
David lets go of my hand and presses his face to the window, waiting for the clouds to part so he can get his first glimpse of our new life.
A woman in the seat across the aisle looks at us and smiles and a deep sense of contentment stirs in my bones. Here we are, a little family, broken at the edges but slowly piecing ourselves back together.
We spent the last few months in London living in a rented house while I finalized the sale of my Soho flat. A safe house you could call it, though Hannah blanched when the family liaison officer used that name to describe it, as that was how Paul had referred to the shed: their ‘safe house’. So I suggested we call it our holiday home; a place to stay for a while until we were ready to face the world again.