Chapter Fifty-Nine

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Glasgow

November 2024

ERIN

Erin is walking—very slowly, and with the aid of a walking stick—with Quinn through Kelvingrove Park. It’s a glorious autumnal day, bright sunshine peeling through the gold spaces of the park that are populated with people meeting up with friends and walking their dogs. Nearby a young boy in a green overcoat kicks a pile of yellow and red leaves. She is already out of breath, and so Quinn tells her to sit down. The bench overlooks the city. It’s a nice spot to stop, close to a coffee van, too.

“You want anything to eat?” her father asks.

“Just a cappuccino,” she says.

He returns a few minutes later with two cappuccinos and two flapjacks. She raises her hand and takes it carefully from him, amazed all over again by the prosthetic hand that opens and closes around the cup. She cried when they first showed the fake hands to her, and even when they put them on she felt it was impossible, that she would never get used to it. That she could never feel okay with it. But here she is, doing normal stuff, like a normal girl. She is different. She grieves her old self, and she still cries herself to sleep over Arlo.

But today feels normal, and nice, and maybe that is enough.

Across the park there’s a little girl about three years old walking between an older couple. She holds their hands: they must be the child’s grandparents. She watches, intently, thinking of the day she introduced Freya to Arlo’s parents, explaining she is their granddaughter. The look on their faces is something she will never, ever forget. In a moment, all the anger and hurt between them all seemed to melt away. They are good and kind to Freya, and she is getting to know them, too—surprisingly, her family seems to have tripled in size. She used to be jealous of people who said they were part of a large family. And yet now she falls into that category, and it’s a beautiful feeling.

“I was thinking,” Quinn says, sipping his drink. “Once your mum has recovered, maybe you could come and stay with me for a while. And Freya, of course.” He clears his throat, visibly awkward. “I just think it’s time to get to know her. And you. I mean, only if you want to. Heather would love it…”

“I think that’s a great idea,” she says, cutting him off as he starts to meander into reasons that are secondary to the real one. She smiles at him, eager to encourage this new show of vulnerability, at his willingness to try. “Once Mum is better.”

Yesterday, Clem had her heart transplant. It took eight hours—the longest eight hours of Erin’s life. Even Freya was worried, despite them all taking extra care not to tell her too much about what was going on. But she could read them all, could work out that they were gearing up for something. Erin told her that Grandma was going into hospital for a few weeks, that they could go visit her once she was well enough. She found herself keeping her fingers crossed behind her back when she told Freya this, because she had literally no idea how she would explain death to a child so young. She couldn’t think about how it would feel to lose her mother, let alone to have to deal with a grieving toddler.

When the surgeon called to say the transplant was successful, she cried for an hour, the full force of what she had faced hitting her like a tsunami. To lose both her mum and Arlo in less than a year—she might not have recovered from that. She’s going to save up and take herself, her mum, and Freya on a holiday somewhere gorgeous, once they’re both recovered enough to travel. Maybe Greece, or the Seychelles.

But for now, she’s focused on her physiotherapy sessions and rebuilding her relationship with her dad. This new version of him seems cool. Chastened, patient.

“I’d like to get to know the boys,” she says.

“Your brothers,” Quinn corrects.

Erin stares at him, realizing that he has never acknowledged this until now. Toby, Daniel, and Elijah are three little boys who share her green, feline eyes, and 50 percent of her DNA.

“Freya’s uncles,” she adds, and Quinn visibly takes that in.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I did know that. But I’d also forgotten it.”

“A visit sounds lovely,” she says. “What should Freya call you? ‘Granddad’ or ‘Grandpa’?”

He winces. “I’ll think about that one.”

A raven has been watching them from the other side of the park. Quinn tears off a few pieces from his flapjack and throws them toward the bird, but it simply stares at them, uninterested in the food. Erin admires the iridescent gleam of his coat, shades of teal, lilac, and navy striated within the black feathers. She thinks of Arlo, a lump in her throat. But the raven stays put, and even when an enthusiastic Labrador bounds up toward it, the magnificent bird only waddles a few cautious steps away, only to turn back to face her. She finds herself thinking of what the Brother said about the book. About it enabling Carriers to soul-slip into the bodies of birds, particularly ravens.

Could Arlo have done that, right before he died? Was that the strange black flash she saw before he fell to the ground?

Either way, the images in her head feel a little easier, less disruptive, with this new possibility lacing through them. She likes the thought of it—Arlo as a bird, free to fly wherever he wants.

She watches the bird unfold its wings and fly off, soaring high above the city toward the gothic prongs of the university tower.