Beneath the Shadows

They should be home.
The thought scratched at Grace’s mind as she peered out of a narrow upstairs window. The sun had long since been banished behind a blanket of thick grey cloud. In front of her, the wild moorland rolled away to be absorbed by the gloom of twilight.
Grace turned and trailed through the cottage, flicking at wall switches, shaking the shadows from their slumbers and driving them out. She moved as though in a trance, the surroundings still surreal to her, although it had been over a week since they had moved in. The upstairs corridor was poky, and the ceiling so low that she had spent the last few days watching Adam stooping under the beams. The staircase was steep, the wood beneath the carpet uneven, so it was better to tread on the outer edges of each step rather than stumble into the indentations of myriad footsteps gone before.
She made her careful way downstairs, through the small living room that was littered with packing boxes, and headed into the kitchen, moving again to a window, unable to stop herself from looking out across the sloping moors towards the distant road that wound in and out of sight. A few trees were silhouetted on the horizon, their brittle skeletons bent from regular lashings by the coastal winds. The view before her was utterly still.
She took a deep breath, trying to quell the worry that was winding her nerves into knots. Adam’s note had unsettled her. “Won’t be long. I have to talk to you when I get back, don’t go anywhere. A x”
Back in the lounge, Grace threw herself into an armchair, one hand brushing over the raked leather where a long-dead cat had once regularly sharpened its claws. She looked around the cottage—their cottage, though it was nearly impossible to think of it that way.
“It’s an incredible gift,” she could still hear Adam enthusing, over and over, when they had first found out his grandparents had bequeathed Hawthorn Cottage to him. “It’s like fate is giving us a bloody great shove in the back. Our own place, no mortgage, away from the rat race, a chance for Millie to start life among nature rather than believing that trees grow through cracks in the pavement. Come on, Gracie, let’s give it a go.”
At that point Grace had been overwhelmed by pads and pumps and nappies, and had somehow found herself agreeing with every point he made. Adam was right. Who wanted red-top buses flying past their London flat at all hours; noise, lights, people everywhere? This way they could escape their financial pressures for a while. She didn’t want to leave Millie while she was tiny, and go back to her marketing job, with its meager wage and demanding retail clients. It wasn’t her vocation, and to satisfy her demanding boss she oft en had to stay long after office hours were over.

From BENEATH THE SHADOWS by Sara Foster, copyright © 2011 by the author, and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books for Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.