Free The Way Back Home by Freya North

yet unchanged.
    ‘I lost it,’ he said in the same gentle tone. ‘My eye, my sight.’ He watched how she nodded but couldn’t look at him.
    ‘Sixty per cent of injured eyes become phthisical and require either evisceration or enucleation,’ he continued quickly, as if medical facts made it less personal, as if being in the majority made it somehow less severe.
    ‘I – I don’t know what those words mean,’ she struggled, staring hard at the floor.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
    And Oriana thought how ridiculous it was that the word should come from Malachy. The constriction in her throat made it impossible for her to say so.
    ‘The terms, the minutiae,’ Malachy qualified, ‘they’re just part of my lexicon – I forget.’
    Oriana glanced at him, then away, then to the door. Suddenly, Malachy really didn’t want her to go, not yet, not now she was back after such a very long time.
    ‘Beyond twenty feet, everyone sees the world as if they have only one eye,’ he said. He lifted her wrist and placed her hand over her eye. Pointing for her to look at the back of the gallery, he lifted her hand off, then on. He needed to change the subject, draw her back from the past to right here, in his gallery. An extraordinary thing that they should be marvelling about. ‘You’re back – from the States.’ It was a fact, not a question.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How long for?’
    ‘I’m back for good.’
    Just then, to Oriana, the word seemed preposterous. Life on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly seemed ridiculously complicated. Where could she run to next? Australia?
    ‘Or for the time being,’ she added.
    ‘And are you in the area – for the time being?’
    She nodded. ‘Hathersage.’
    ‘At your mother’s?’ He couldn’t contain his surprise and it made her giggle. He had her gaze once again.
    She rolled her eyes at herself and shrugged. Pathetic really. Thirty-four years old and living with her mother.
    ‘And are you OK, Oriana? Are you all right?’
    He always knew. He always knew when she wasn’t.
    Malachy watched as she hauled herself to her tallest and pulled the widest smile possible across her face.
    ‘Oh, I’m
good
,’ she said, with drama and drawl to her inflection.
    And then the gallery phone rang. And an elderly couple came in. Followed by a father and a teenage boy. And Malachy thought this is very, very bad timing. All of it. He knew that as soon as he turned away from her, returned to the demands of his day, Oriana would disappear. In the blink of an eye, she’d be gone. That’s what had happened all those years ago. Now you see her, now you don’t.

CHAPTER NINE
    ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’ Jed laughed at Malachy when he arrived at the gallery just before closing. ‘Sorry – I know I said lunch-time. The day ran away with me.’
    His brother was just staring at him.
    ‘I bought food though,’ Jed said. ‘Including ground coffee.’
    ‘I just saw Oriana.’
    Malachy watched the colour drain from Jed’s face while redness crept up his throat.
    ‘Oriana?’ Jed looked quickly around him. ‘
Here?
’
    ‘Here.’
    ‘How did she know you work here?’
    ‘She didn’t.’ Malachy paused. Jed was visibly flummoxed. ‘She literally showed up out of the blue,’ he told him. ‘She said she’s back from the States and living with her mother.’ Jed was speechless, staring at her father’s paintings as if they held a clue, if not an actual answer. ‘She was surprised I’m not a best-selling author. I completely forgot to ask her what she does.’
    ‘Did she leave a number?’
    ‘No.’ Malachy thought about it. ‘I wonder if Robin knows.’ He looked at Robin’s paintings too. He turned to Jed. ‘Did you pop in on him today?’
    Jed hit his forehead. ‘Sorry – sorry. I didn’t. No.’
    ‘I’ll call in when we get back,’ said Malachy.
    ‘Will you tell him? About Oriana?’
    Malachy thought about it. ‘No,’ he said.
    ‘Does he talk about