Free The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones Page A

to contact you since?’
    She shook her head, not wanting to voice it aloud and admit to herself what that probably meant.
    ‘I’m sorry, Hannah. It’s an evil thing, this. It has to end. I’ll do everything I can to help you.’
    She fought back tears. Hooking tea bags out of the brews, she stirred in powdered milk and handed Sebastien a mug.
    Cupping his hands around it, he watched Leah. She was curled in the opposite armchair. ‘Can I make a suggestion?’
    ‘Please.’
    ‘We put your little one to bed upstairs. There’s a child’s room with a bed already made up. The next few days are going to be tough on her, and she’s going to have to adjust fast.’
    Hannah looked over at the girl, resisting the urge to gather her into her arms. Before Leah’s birth, she had believed the emotions Nate stirred in her the pinnacle of what a human being could feel: love and terror, in equal quantities; love so powerful that it overwhelmed – but never conquered – her fear of exposing him to the shadows stalking her; terror that she could lose someone who made her feel like this. Yet when Leah arrived in their lives, she was startled once more by the power and complexity of her feelings: love and terror again, hopelessly intertwined, now on a colossal scale; love that did not compete with what she felt for Nate but reached out and gathered all three of them in its arms; terror multiplied, magnified now by the awful possibilities of losing them both, losing one and seeing that loss in the face of the other, or – this last thought one that whispered only in her darkest moments – having to choose between them, sacrificing one so the other might live.
    From that first day, she had promised herself she would not allow the events that destroyed her own childhood to spill over into her daughter’s. But already history seemed to be repeating, with Hannah a helpless witness. That it had to end was an easy thing for Sebastien to say. She had always told herself that when the time came, she would fight rather than flee. But flee was what she had been forced to do.
    It was, she vowed, a temporary flight. She could still fight. She still had Leah, and Nate still clung to life. If he lost that battle – she felt her throat constrict at the very possibility – then while a fundamental part of her life would be over, the responsibility to keep Leah safe would fall even more heavily upon her. And while she wasn’t ready to contemplate a world without Nate, she would readily trade her life to secure her daughter’s future.
    Yet what if the worst did happen? What if Nate lost his battle and Hannah traded her life for her daughter’s? Leah would be left utterly alone. After tonight’s appalling events, Hannah had to presume that her father was dead. That left no one. No one on Nate’s side. All her own family gone. For Leah’s sake, one of them had to survive this. Which led her back to the same dilemma. Fight or flee. She was starting to understand just what impossible choices those that had gone before her had been forced to make.
    Hannah made herself list the positives. The farmhouse could still function as her father had intended: a safe-house, a reprieve from the hunt. She had won them some time now – time to make plans, time for Nate to recuperate, time for her to explain things to Leah as best she could.
    She looked at Sebastien sitting in the armchair before her. She knew his eyes measured her, assessing the levels of her strength, her resolve. What part did he play in this? After his initial abruptness, the gentleness of his words had betrayed the warmth in him. She felt she had an ally here. But she also suspected there were things he had not told her. Knowledge had always been the most important weapon in all of this. It was still the one thing she lacked the most.
    She needed to earn Sebastien’s trust. And quickly. Everything he could tell her – about Jakab, and about her father – had the potential to be useful,