A Single Breath: A gripping, twist-filled thriller that will have you hooked. Lucy Clarke

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       8

      Eva drifts through the shack as her mother continues talking. She catches the words scan, due date, trimester – words she associates with work, not her own pregnancy.

      She pauses by a photo of her and Jackson she’d brought with her from England. It was taken last summer at a 1920s-themed jazz festival in London. In the picture Eva is wearing a drop-waisted flapper-girl dress and a beaded headband, and Jackson has one hand around her waist, and with his other he’s touching the brow of his black hat, laughing. There’s sun flare behind them and they both look tanned and happy, in love.

      Tucking the phone under her ear, Eva takes down the picture. It’s housed in a thin glass frame, and she uses the hem of her dress to clean her fingerprints from the glass. She moves the fabric in slow circles until it is polished clear, and then she sets it back on the shelf.

      ‘So you’ll be coming home?’ her mother is saying.

      ‘Home?’ Eva repeats, tuning back in. ‘No. Not yet.’

      ‘What?’ The pitch of her mother’s voice rises.

      ‘It hasn’t changed my plans out here.’

      ‘What about your scan?’

      ‘They do have hospitals in Australia,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘Anyway, Callie will be out here in a few days.’

      Eva doesn’t need her mother to worry about all the details; she just needs to hear someone tell her, This is fantastic news! You’re going to be a wonderful mother, Eva.

      ‘You’ll worry me to death travelling around out there on your own, pregnant.’ Her mother’s emotional fragility has always meant any problem instantly becomes hers. The pregnancy would become about her anxieties, her involvement, her fears. ‘What about if you have your old room back and I make the spare into a nursery –’

      ‘Mum,’ she cuts in firmly as she pushes away from the wall and steps out onto the deck. The beach is empty and sunlight shimmers tantalizingly over the bay. She’s been on Wattleboon for three days now and already feels a strangely intimate tie to this island, knowing that Jackson spent his summers here as a boy. He would’ve played on many of these beaches, surfed and dived in the waves, fished from the jetty and from his father’s boat. And now, all these years later, Eva and the baby she carries inside her are also here – walking the same shorelines, seeing the same vistas. It’s as if she can feel Jackson’s footprints still warm under the sand.

      She tells her mother, ‘Right now this is where I want to be.’

      *

      That evening, Eva grabs the bottle of wine she’d bought earlier and sets out along the shore towards Saul’s house. He hasn’t visited her at the shack and has only cast a cursory wave in her direction when he’s been going out diving in the bay. It feels as if he’s purposely keeping his distance.

      The smell of seaweed is ripe in the air and crabs scuttle between the tide line and their holes as she passes. At the end of the bay, stone steps cut into a rocky, tree-lined hill. She follows them up into Saul’s garden. Set back in the gum trees is a modest wooden house built on stilts. A wide deck runs along the front and the whole place blends so seamlessly into the surroundings that it could almost pass as a tree house.

      She finds Saul gutting fish on an old wooden workbench, beside which is a faded blue kayak. He has his back to her and is wearing a dark T-shirt with canvas shorts, his feet bare. She watches him for a moment, her gaze lingering on the broadness of his neck – the shape СКАЧАТЬ