Free Fallen by Lia Mills

and fumbled with the latch. When it wouldn’t give, he grunted his frustration and punched the side.
    ‘Easy, Bill.’ Mother’s voice shook.
    ‘Where are the others?’ I asked.
    She didn’t take her eyes off Dad. ‘Florrie’s at the shops. As for Matt …’
    Florrie was no great loss, and Matt was most likely hanging
around some stage door or other. It was Eva I wanted, but she was at home, getting over one of her many kidney infections.
    The trunk’s latch clicked open. Dad lifted the lid. Liam’s tunic rose, as though it breathed. A mucky, sickening stench seeped through the room. It coated my tongue, stuck in my throat.
    Mother pressed a handkerchief to her face. ‘God help us, what
is
that smell?’
    Dad lifted a corner of the tunic to look beneath it. ‘Let’s see, what does he have here? … Ah, no. Look, Mildred. The watch is broken.’
    I looked over his shoulder. The open face of the pocket watch Dad gave Liam when he went to work for the firm, his own father’s gift to him, was smashed, the hands long gone. He groped for it, like a blind man. I knelt beside him and put the watch into his hand, closed his fingers over its face. Then I lifted the khaki tunic and hugged it, never mind the stink. The arms unfolded and hung at an angle, stiff and empty. I let go and the khaki slid to my lap. I pushed it to the floor, rubbed my palms on the rug to get rid of its greasy residue.
    With his free hand, Dad took a packet of letters from the box. His knees cracked when he stood and carried them to the chair opposite Mother’s. He sat into it heavily, letting out a sound like a groan. He slipped the watch into his waistcoat pocket, where it used to live before he gave it to Liam, and unfolded a sheet of paper from a thick ivory-coloured envelope at the top of the pile. ‘Here’s one from Isabel.’ He might have been going through any morning’s post at breakfast, sharing snippets of holiday news.
    ‘
My own darling Liam
,’ he began.
    Something squeezed my throat. ‘Dad! That’s private!’ Liam’s love for Isabel Tierney was the one thing about him
that was closed to me, a locked room, but I’d a queer urge to defend it. All the arguments I’d had with myself, fighting the jealousy that Eva warned would turn him against me, crowded into my mind.
    Mother was pinching the skin between her eyebrows. ‘Privacy’s no use to Liam now.’
    ‘
Your letters worry me
,’ Dad went on. ‘
They hardly seem to come from you at all
.’
    ‘Please don’t,’ I said.
    He turned his back on me, holding the paper so as to catch more light. ‘
We’ve a lot to talk about when you come home
.’
    ‘What date is on it?’ Mother asked.
    ‘March. Here’s another.’
    I tried to see the envelope in his hand, relieved by a glimpse of ivory What if he found mine? But this was another from Isabel.
    ‘
Why have you not written
’ – Dad cleared his throat and went on reading – ‘
since your leave was cancelled? I feel so cheated. It must be a million times worse for you. Don’t let the war change you
…’ He looked away from the page towards the window.
    ‘What’s the date on that one, Bill?’
    ‘15th April.’
    ‘He’d have got it the week before … Is there a later one?’
    He shuffled through them. ‘I don’t see one.’
    She sagged back into her chair. ‘She meant to end their engagement!’
    ‘She doesn’t say that,’ I said, uneasy.
    ‘She doesn’t have to, it’s clear as day.’
    ‘No, it’s not.’ I bundled the tunic back into the trunk, any old way, and stood up.
    ‘Imagine it.’ Mother’s voice shook. ‘And, Bill, she has your mother’s ring.’
    ‘They’re not our letters,’ I appealed to Dad. ‘We shouldn’t read them.’
    He appeared to have aged ten years in as many minutes. ‘What should I do with them?’
    My mind raced back through letters I’d written, things I’d revealed to Liam that I never would have said to my parents, information about our friends,