The Lost Sister: A gripping emotional page turner with a breathtaking twist. Tracy Buchanan

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      Just as the sun begins to rise the next day, Becky makes her way back to the hospital. When she gets there, it’s eerily quiet. The light from the sun outside the vast windows is white, blinding. She heads to her mum’s room but a nurse, tired and disapproving, stops her. ‘No visitors until nine.’

      ‘It’s important,’ Becky says.

      The nurse holds her gaze. Something in Becky’s expression must make her change her mind. ‘Okay, just a few minutes,’ the nurse says.

      Becky walks to her mum’s room. Her mum is sitting up in bed, as though she’s been expecting her.

      ‘You wanted me to live in the cave with you, didn’t you?’ Becky asks her.

      Her mum nods, smiling slightly. ‘I left your dad, darling, not you. I wanted to take you with me. I fought to have you with me. Even went to court.’

      Becky frowns. ‘Court?’ She vaguely remembers talking to official-looking people, but nothing about her mum going to court. Her dad must have kept it from her. Maybe that was a good thing. ‘Why didn’t I get to live with you then?’

      Her mum’s face darkens. She sighs and looks out of the window. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

      Becky walks to the chair by her bed, sitting down and taking her mum’s hand. ‘I’ll take you to the cave.’

      Her mum’s face lights up. Then, for the first time in a long time, Becky sees her mum cry.

      That evening, they arrive in the little car park near the cave. Becky peers behind her, anticipating a nurse chasing after them, maybe even the police. It feels so illicit, sneaking her mum out of hospital. Even more so grabbing all the medication and supplies Becky needed from the vet practice, telling Kay she’d explain everything but she needed a few days off.

      She helps her mum out of the car, shrugging the large rucksack she’s brought onto her back. Her mum pauses, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looks out towards the bay. A hidden treasure, as the tourist website describes it. Stretches of golden sand. White cliffs. But the biggest draw: the white chalk stacks extending towards the sky. Perfect photo fodder, especially at sunset. Becky remembers being there as a child, walking on the sand, feeling it beneath her toes. Her mum posing against one of the rocks as her dad took photos. Click, click, click.

      And then darker memories, glaring at the cave from a distance, its opening like the mouth of a monster who’d gobbled her mum up.

      ‘Good, the tide’s out. Let’s go,’ Becky says. Her mum nods and they step carefully onto the wooden pathway, Becky supporting her mum’s frail body.

      The café is still there. Tired-looking. Quiet before the evening rush. Becky remembers they used to go there some evenings and weekends. She’d chase her friends around as her mum sat drinking gin, dark sunglasses over her eyes, Mike silent beside her. And then those times after her mum left; the awkward meet-ups that grew more and more infrequent as the months went by. The memories still cause her pain – how desperate she was to run to her mum and beg her to come back, but her childish insolence stopped her every time.

      They step off the pathway and onto the sand, walking across the shadows of the chalk stacks slowly, surely. The next bay comes into view then. You don’t see them at first, the caves. Like hidden entrances in a labyrinth, they’re sliced into the sides of the white cliffs. The first one, smaller than the others, is strewn with rubbish, remnants of burnt-out candles. Becky wonders whether she’d have come here as a teenager if she had stayed with her mum, smoked things she shouldn’t have, curled up with boys instead of reading alone. It might have been a very different life to that she’d had in the town she and her dad had eventually moved to.

      She helps her mum limp past the first cave, then the second, which is larger but so low you have to duck to get in. In the distance, her mum’s house, the hotel, stands grand above the last cave. Her mum’s step quickens, her breath too, as they draw closer to her cave, as she’s been calling it. It’s right at the end of the bay, away from the hustle and bustle of the more popular bay, cut off by a jagged plank of white cliff.

      And then, there it is, in all its glory. The cave that swallowed her mum whole.

      Glimmers of recognition rush through Becky as she stares at it. She hears flashes of laughter, a dog barking. Fish, slippery in her hands. The sun twinkling above. And then her mum, as she was all those years ago, looking down at her with love.

      Why are they coming back now, all the good memories? Where were they when the bad ones crashed over her? The sight of her mum, tanned and strange, when she met her in the café all those times after she left them. Her dad’s anger, her mum’s nonchalance. The tears she shed when she was desperate for her mum’s arms around her, the hate that filled her when she realised she was never coming back.

      As they draw closer to the cave, Becky sees a small one that has a notice at its front: Do not enter. Risk of falling rock. Her mum’s face darkens when she looks at it.

      ‘Is it safe?’ Becky asks, hesitating.

      ‘My one is.’

       My one.

      ‘Sure?’ Becky asks.

      ‘Absolutely. Come on.’

      They walk up to the cave and pause, taking it in. Large chalk boulders are littered here and there, painted an assortment of colours, some smashed, one charred. The white clay of the cave is mossy in parts, ledges jutting out. Becky remembers standing on one of those ledges, looking out to sea.

      Painted around the edges of the cave’s entrance are different animals, and shells too. Even a child and a dog. The paint has faded slightly but it’s still discernible.

      Her mum raises her hand, touching the clay. ‘Feel it,’ she says. ‘It’s softer than you think.’

      Becky leans her hand against it and realises her mum’s right. It even crumbles beneath her palm. As she takes her hand away, she notices there are man-made dents down the length of the cave’s entrance, and a black metal plate drilled into it, as if there was once something hanging there.

      Her mum peers into the cave, a sense of peace spreading over her face.

      Becky notices her mum’s breath is laboured, her eyes hollow. ‘Come on then, let’s get you inside.’

      She helps her mum step in, the sound and smell of the sea suddenly muffling all her senses. It’s as though the cave is absorbing everything but the sea … even absorbing her. The temperature drops, and Becky notices the damp moss on the walls, the slimy vegetation. Her feet sink into the sand, wet, cold, sand flies leaping around her shoes. Rubbish congeals around the edges of the cave, cigarette butts and rotting fish bones.

      How could her mum have lived here? No wonder she wasn’t allowed to bring Becky to live here too. And how could she want to die here? But then she’s never quite understood her mum.

      ‘Look,’ her mum says, pointing to the wall at the back. Her eyes are alight, as if she’s seeing another place entirely.

      Becky gasps. It’s covered with people, sculpted from the rocks then painted. These faces smile out at her: a girl wearing a white dress with a book in her hand; a black man with a dog at his СКАЧАТЬ