Free The First Time I Saw Your Face by Hazel Osmond

new shop round the back of the hospital a go. Sandwich tasted a bit weird though, left a lot of it.’
    Her mother screwed up her face. ‘Meant to tell you not to go there. You know Craig who helps with the silage?’
    ‘Craig with the long nails who keeps ferrets in his kitchen?’
    Her mother nodded. ‘His daughter’s bought that shop.’
    Jennifer almost spat her cake out. ‘Lovely, ferret-meat sandwiches.’
    ‘Don’t be daft,’ her mother said seriously. ‘You can’t eat ferret meat, it might even be illegal.’
    Jennifer went back to eating her cake with slightly less gusto. As she chewed she watched Louise’s hand curl itself around one of her mother’s fingers and felt again that sense of peace she had experienced on the drive home, even if she couldn’t go so far as to call it contentment. Everything was safe and familiar here in the kitchen with the clock ticking, the Rayburn pumpingout the heat, the big wooden table solid with memories of family meals.
    ‘Alex rang again,’ her mother said and Jennifer’s sense of peace withered. There were all kinds of things lurking under her mother’s statement: the hint of disapproval that Jennifer had not returned his earlier call and, most gut-wrenching of all, the inference that she should get on the phone right now because Alex was obviously still keen on her and how much longer did she think she could leave the poor man dangling?
    ‘He mentioned something about a dinner with the Henshaws? Carlisle on Wednesday? Said he’d pick you up at seven.’ Jennifer couldn’t bear to see that awful optimism in her mother’s eyes.
    ‘Let’s have a look at the lamb-cam,’ she said, almost sprinting towards the small television perched on the worktop by the window and knowing her mother wouldn’t have been fooled by the unsubtle change of subject. Installed with great fanfare, the lamb-cam relayed images from the four CCTV cameras fitted in the lambing barns and enabled her father to see at a glance what was going on. With the sound turned right up, it was easy to hear the distinctive bleat and blare of a ewe about to give birth. Though it was rarely on during the day, at night it enabled her father to simply tumble out of bed at regular intervals and check what was going on rather than having to go out to the barn in the dark and cold.
    Jennifer switched on the monitor, turned up thevolume and waited for the screen, split into four, to settle. Lambing had barely begun yet, and she did not expect to see much happening, but in one of the quarters she could see her father and brother bent over a ewe. She fiddled with the volume, but could not pick up what they were saying.
    ‘Hear the cottage next to Mr Armstrong is rented out,’ she said back over her shoulder, ‘Sonia mentioned something about a writer?’
    She realised it was a mistake as soon as she’d said it. There was the lemon-drop look.
    ‘Just a writer, Mum, not a journalist,’ she said hurriedly, but her mother made a little ‘humph’ noise and Jennifer knew it would be a good idea to retrieve her jacket and pop out and see how Ray and Danny were doing.
    In this mood her mother reminded her of a particularly ferocious lioness protecting her cubs.
    Outside the light looked fragile and the cold hit her after the warmth of the kitchen, but inside the smallest of the rooms in the barn the lamps used to warm the lambs gave everything a comforting glow. The combined smell of sweet hay and warm sheep was one that reached down deep inside her to tell her everything here was safe, like when she was a child. The old Jennifer.
    She had a quick look in a couple of pens and the knobbly-kneed lambs stared up at her and bleated; a high, thin noise. They had that shell-shocked look they all had at being born, and tottered about on their spindly legs, their wool still yellow from the afterbirth.
    Her father and her brother were further down the barn, her father watching as Danny tried to push a tiny lamb under a