Free Brightwood by Tania Unsworth Page A

the bowl nearer to her with the tips of his fingers. “The little ones are the sweetest.”
    He was right. The little strawberries tasted the best, and it was just the right time of year for them. Daisy, however, had no appetite.
    â€œI’ll eat them later,” she said.
    â€œPromise?”
    She nodded.
    He stared at her in silence for a moment and then pushed back his chair.
    â€œWell,” he said, “I noticed some tools in the gardening shed. I might as well get started on those weeds.”
    Daisy wanted to tell him to leave the weeds alone. They weren’t
his
weeds. And this wasn’t his house, although he was acting as if he lived here. But he looked so big when he stood up, big enough to blot out the sun, and Daisy was afraid.
    He’s only trying to be nice,
she told herself.
    She took the bowl of strawberries and went inside, making sure to lock the kitchen door.

THIRTEEN

    Daisy watched the man from the window of her grand­father’s old study for nearly an hour. He spent the whole time in the front part of the grounds, slicing at the meadowsweet and nettles with a pair of shears. If Frank had been there to comment, she might have said he was hacking his way through deepest jungle, although Daisy thought the man’s behavior was more random than that. His attack on the vegetation didn’t seem to have any method. He simply moved from one place to another, choosing plants as if by whim. And she couldn’t help feeling that he took a kind of glee in the deadly snip of the shears, beheading the tall thistles with a flourish of his arms, demolishing the trailing honeysuckle at a single stroke.
    Daisy turned away from the window, her hands clenched.
    When she looked again, the man was gone. Daisy went up to her bedroom and saw him rowing back across the lake to the boathouse. She waited until she felt fairly sure he wasn’t coming back, then made her way outside to the topiary.
    She sat in the middle, with her back against True.
    â€œHe wasn’t weeding at all,” she told the horse. “He was just cutting.”
    Daisy looked at the skeletal forms of the long-­dead bushes. The creeping stems of a morning glory plant had wound their way up one of the legs of the smallest elephant and produced a single flower, a blue star with faded, curling petals. The flower was right in the place where the elephant’s eye used to be, and for a moment, Daisy thought the animal was looking at her.
    â€œIf nobody knows you exist, how do
you
know you exist?” she asked True.
    She felt his leaves brushing her cheek.
    â€œHow do you know if you’re real?” she said.
    â€œYou feel the wind,” he suggested. “You see the clouds passing overhead. You hear the hum of the earth turning.”
    â€œBut how can you be sure?” Daisy said. “How can you be sure you’re not imagining it? Or somebody else is. What if someone is just imagining me? Like a character in a book. Do characters in books know they’re only made-­up?”
    She felt the start of tears.
    â€œClose your eyes,” True told her. “Are they closed?”
    Daisy nodded.
    â€œBe still. Listen. Deep inside you, deeper than your mind and deeper than your heart, something lies hidden. Nothing can touch it, not the gardener’s shears, not rain or storm, not even the boxwood blight. Can you feel it?”
    Daisy felt the slow surge of her breath and the beating of her heart.
    â€œI . . . don’t know.”
    â€œConcentrate,” True said.
    She opened her eyes and stared up at the calm, endless sky until something unfurled within her that was just as calm and just as endless.
    â€œThat’s your Shape,” True told her. “That’s how you know you exist. And you have to keep your Shape, Daisy. No matter what happens.”
    â€œI will,” she said. “I promise I will.”
    She sat for a while in silence, with the sun on her