Chapter 16

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Present day.

Shay knew he needed to do something, Orla could have serious internal injuries including to her brain and the sooner he got help the better. And even if she had miraculously escaped anything serious, she could get hypothermia unless he got her warm and dry soon.

He very carefully scooped her up and started walking up the stairs towards Starlight Cottage, but every bone in his body was aching. She wasn’t heavy but he had never cursed these one hundred and thirteen steps as much as he did now, and he was trying to climb them very slowly so as not to jostle her.

Panic and fear pushed him on. He had to get help, she had to be OK, she just had to be.

He got to the top of the steps and he quickly made his way to the back door. He lay her down very carefully on one of the sun loungers that was in a covered part of the garden and moved over to the mat by the back door. He cleared it of snow and lifted it, and his heart sank. The spare key wasn’t there. He desperately cleared the snow from the ground in the area surrounding the mat just in case it had shifted, but it wasn’t there. He must have used it at some point and never put it back.

He stood back up and glanced over at Orla. She was so pale.

He was going to have to break in and though there were many crappy things he had done in his misspent youth, breaking into someone’s house hadn’t been one of them. He didn’t know the first thing about how he could break into his own house. He needed some tools, but they were all locked away in the garage. He could throw a brick through a window but what would that achieve? All the windows were locked so throwing a brick through one wouldn’t mean he could reach through the hole and open it from the inside. The backdoor didn’t have a handy key positioned in the lock like he saw on many a TV programme. He supposed if he broke enough of the glass, he could crawl through one of the larger windows and find a spare key somewhere inside.

He grabbed a large stone and weighed it up in his hand. He wasn’t sure it was big enough to cause any damage and for the first time he was grateful his puppy, Ivy, was deaf and him breaking in wouldn’t scare her.

He threw the stone at the window and then ducked as it bounced off the glass leaving it completely unscathed. He picked it up and tried again to the same result. Any other time this would be funny, but right now he was too scared for Orla to find any humour in this.

He grabbed a brick but instead of throwing it, he wrapped his hand in his jacket and used the brick to smash the window, sending shards of glass everywhere. He cleared all the glass from the pane, which was taking way too long and then he took his jacket off and lay it down over the glass so he could crawl through into the house.

Once he was inside, he ran through to the kitchen, briefly noticing that Ivy was fast asleep on the sofa and that there was toilet paper strewn across the lounge. He knew he really should crate her when he left the house, but it made her so distressed that he just couldn’t do it. She was relatively calm about being left if she had free run of the house and it was his own fault if he hadn’t closed the bathroom door to prevent any toilet paper incidents.

He rifled through the drawers in the kitchen, until he found the spare key for the back door.

He rushed to the back door, opened it and then ran back to Orla’s side. He carefully slid his hands under her to lift her when she let out a moan. He froze.

‘Orla, can you hear me?’