The Little Clock House on the Green. Eve Devon

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       Chapter 3

       Within the Sound of Silence

       Kate

      Kate sat cross-legged staring out to sea, Juliet’s latest postcard tucked away in her over-the-shoulder bag. Out of sight. And weighing on her mind and tempting her as if it was gold and ring-shaped and called ‘The Precious’.

      No matter how she turned it all in her head, she couldn’t come up with a way of getting her mindset to return to life before the postcards.

      The third postcard, a.k.a, The Precious, was succinct, to say the least:

      She had read between the lines. She’d read above the lines and below the lines and the actual lines themselves.

      Over and over and over.

      And now her head was so full of possibility she could barely breathe.

      She tried to remember exactly when had been the last time she’d felt this wealth of ideas rushing forward, this sense of future slotting quietly into place?

      Her fingers flexed involuntarily as her heart clutched against the memory.

      It had been the 9th October 2013.

      Kate squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head helplessly.

      She wasn’t going there.

      And yet if she did this, if she went home and looked into buying The Clock House, she was definitely going to have to ‘go there’.

       Be there.

      Back in Whispers Wood.

      Without Bea.

      The sister who’d dreamed up that future right alongside her.

      Kate stared hard at the wide ocean in front of her.

      Bea was gone and was never coming back and Kate missed her every blessed day.

      And every day she tried to get okay with missing her.

      If she returned to Whispers Wood, Kate would be saying that she could deal with being back without Bea.

      Or, at the very least, she would be saying she was going to try.

      Again.

      Because it wasn’t like she hadn’t gone home before. Over the years since Bea’s death, she’d made plenty of duty visits to see her mum. Visits where the only view was that of watching her mum exist silently on the fringes of life – not ready to re-engage – not able to re-engage. Well, not with Kate, anyway.

      ‘Okay. Not plenty of visits,’ Kate admitted, imagining Bea’s snort of laughter floating to her on the sea breeze. ‘But I’ve been back a few times. Enough times,’ she ended with.

      But each visit she’d avoided the village green and The Clock House.

      She was too fanciful. Too sentimental. Too scared that in looking up at it she’d imagine it winking back at her – stirring everything up.

       Dazzling her.

      Kate blew out a breath.

      It was silly to be even considering returning to Whispers Wood on a more permanent basis and yet all she’d done since she’d received the latest postcard from Juliet was consider just that.

      How could what she had always thought of as her last option, suddenly seem like her only true option?

      ‘What do you think, Bea?’ Kate whispered into the sea breeze. ‘Should I go back?’

      Silence.

      Kate’s ears strained past the sound of the ocean waves lapping against the shore and past the odd cry from a seagull. Not one sound that could magically be made into her sister’s voice giving her approval.

      A tear rolled down her cheek.

      As much as she still felt the gaping chasm Bea’s passing had left behind, she knew something had to change. She’d spent four years expecting, hoping, needing to hear Bea’s voice telling her what to do. Never once had she received an answer.

      Kate swiped a hand under her nose and sniffed.

      She had to make a decision on her own. End this stupid purgatory with the postcards.

      She tried to think of how she’d feel if Old Man Isaac sold to someone else? Or even of how she’d feel if Juliet mentioned in casual conversation, during one of her visits home, that The Clock House had been sold. But it was as if those reactions and emotions were protectively inaccessible. All she had to base her decision on was the spark that Juliet’s postcards had struck inside of her.

      And all the hours of regret that had walked doggedly beside her for four years.

      ‘So make a decision, already,’ Kate muttered, looking around at the pebbles scattered across the sand. She leant over slightly and picked one up. It was mauve in colour with a white vein running across one side.

      Perfect.

      ‘White vein I go back. Plain I go on.’

      She tossed the pebble up into the air and tracked its plummet back to the ground.

      As it lay motionless on the sand before her, there, in between the beats of her heart, she stared at her answer, and then, with a wry, ‘Sod it, then,’ she picked up the pebble and slipped it into her pocket.