Free In Her Shadow by Louise Douglas

anything.’
    ‘You have some great ideas for the annexe. Perhaps you could write them down, Hannah. Email me a few bullet-points …’
    ‘Of course.’
    He looked up at me then. The whites of his eyes were pink with tiredness but the pupils were grey, almost silvery. I hadn’t noticed that before. I wanted to say something to him, to strengthen our connection, but I couldn’t think of anything that would not sound insincere or like a platitude.
    ‘Have a good morning, John,’ I said. Then I left the office, closing the door gently behind me.
    I busied myself with administration work, keeping my head down, shoulders straight, repelling any well-meant enquiries as to my well-being with body language that gave the message I was fine, and had too much to do to indulge in small talk.
    I don’t think anybody noticed how I kept glancing around, to see if anyone was watching me. I don’t think they wereaware that I was keeping my back to the wall, avoiding dark corners.
    The first tour was a class of eleven-year-olds from Bristol Grammar School. They were cheerful, bright children who looked as if they had been fed plenty of vegetables and orange juice in infanthood, with shiny shoes and clothes that had been bought a little too big, for them to grow into. I remembered Jago when he was their age, how the cuffs of his sleeves never reached his wrists, how his jeans were worn through in places, and the scabby tracksuits he wore, his uncle’s cast-offs. I remembered the cracked skin on his lips and his generous, crooked smile, his breath, sour because he never had a toothbrush, and one of his top front teeth was already missing – knocked out by Mr Cardell probably. It gave a rakish look to his grin, although my parents took him to have it fixed after he moved in with us.
    Now Jago lived on the other side of the world. God, how I missed him.
    He had been working, for several years, as a sustainability adviser with the fishing community in a small Newfoundland port. He stayed in close touch with my parents and had bought them a transatlantic cruise for their Golden Wedding anniversary, meeting them off the ship in New York and treating them to what Mum described as a ‘slap-up holiday’. It was Jago’s way of making up for living so far away. The last time I saw him had been a couple of years earlier, after my father’s heart attack. I’d arrived at the hospital in Truro in the early hours. A nurse showed me to the ward. My father was in a private bay at the end. Mum was asleep in a chair. She had been covered over with a blanket, and a pillow had been placed tenderly beneath her cheek to protect her neck from cricking.
    A rugged, broad-shouldered man wearing ill-fitting denim jeans, a scruffy grey T-shirt and a leather string around histhick neck was sitting on a stool on the far side of the bed, with his arms resting on the knees of his splayed legs. The man needed a shave, he looked dog-tired. His hair had been cut very short, his forearms were tattooed and his face was lined. I did not recognize him at first, but as I came into the room he stood up and we held one another’s eyes, and it was as if we were children again.
    ‘Jago!’ I said, wondering how he, who lived thousands of miles away, had managed to reach my father’s bedside before me. I stepped forward to embrace him, but as I did so he stepped back, away. The rejection cut me like a knife.
    ‘How are you?’ I asked.
    Jago ignored the question. ‘Dad’s doing all right,’ he said. ‘They reckon he’s going to pull through.’
    I looked at my father, who seemed childlike lying, as he was, on his back, in the bed, with an oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth. He was terribly pale, and quiet. I thought he would be appalled if he knew that Jago and I found it painful even being in the same room as one another.
    ‘You don’t mind if I sit with you?’ I asked, and now my voice was cold.
    Jago shrugged. I pulled up a chair and we sat on opposite