All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

way of distracting herself from tears.

“I could be so huge. I could be the biggest thing. Miles and miles for ever, on and on. Or so small. Just a little stream over a few rocks…”

She pauses, and her eyes swivel towards me.

“I saw you,” she says, fiercely. “I saw you, once.”

I am now replaying all the times I kissed her brother by the riverside. “… Oh?”

“You had your hands in me.”

I wince. “The cogs. The keys.”

“I cut you,” she says, slowly. “Your blood was in the water.”

The hair prickles at the back of my neck. She’s scaring me now. The Housekeeper has clearly left some long shadow within Lily, some imprint. Maybe even possessed her. This isn’t Lily. This isn’t the girl who would lick books and then scream laughing.

“It healed,” I respond, and remember Fiona’s hand on my stitches yesterday. The skin is sealed now, a red scar that should take weeks to appear. If Lily and Fiona are so changed after the ritual, then what happened to me, and to Roe? Is there something lurking in us, too?

“You can go now,” she says.

“Are you tired?”

“No, I just want you to go.”

“Right. OK,” I look awkwardly at my plastic bag of corner-shop offerings. “Do you want me to leave these?”

She looks at me blankly. “I don’t fucking care.”

I race down the stairs, pushing past Lily’s mum so she doesn’t see that I’m crying.

“Maeve,” she calls. “Maeve, are you all right?”

I walk as fast as I can down the street, my head down, my nose buried in my scarf. Lily is a monster. A monster that doesn’t give a crap I almost died trying to save her, and who would rather live as a body of water than as a human girl.

As I get to the end of the street, I see Roe getting off the bus, his guitar on his back.

“Hey!” he calls, a big smile on his face. “Thank God. You can help me bring this back to my house. I’m not even supposed to be carrying stuff with my injuries.”

I look at him, my eyes wet. His eyes are coated in mascara and black liner. Clearly, make-up is not just a showtime thing any more.

“I can’t, Roe. I can’t go back there. Don’t make me.”

“What? What happened?”

“Lily’s different, Roe.”

He sighs. “I know. But I guess that’s to be expected. We can… We can’t really know what she went through. It’s hard to empathize.”

“What if the Housekeeper is using her, Roe? I looked into her eyes and … and that’s not Lily. That’s the Housekeeper talking.”

“What do you mean? You defeated the Housekeeper, Maeve. She’s gone.”

“Is she, though? Lily’s not even a person any more. She’s just this … this shell.”

“Why? Why are you saying that?”

I break off, remembering the fierce, unforgiving look in Lily’s huge eyes.

“The way she … talked to me.”

“Oh God. Maeve.”

“You weren’t there, Roe. You don’t know.”

“Sit down, Maeve.”

I look around. There’s nowhere to sit, except for his neighbours’ low garden wall, so I perch there. Roe puts his guitar on the pavement, kneels down and gives me a long, slow kiss on the mouth.

“Jesus,” I say, when he pulls away. “What was that for?”

“That was so you don’t get mad at me for what I’m about to say next.”

He takes a deep breath, and sits down on the wall next to me. “Lily doesn’t have to forgive you.”

“What?”

“I understand what you did. I understand everything. So does Fiona. But Lily doesn’t have to. Lily can hate you as much as Lily wants.”

“But…” I say, grappling at this like a rope that’s burning the flesh on my hands. “What I did for her? I became a witch for her. I stuck a knife into my arm.”

“She didn’t see any of it.” He shrugs. “That means nothing to her.”

“But she knows! I told her! You told her! Didn’t you?”

“I told her everything. We’re actually –” he pauses, considering this – “we’re actually closer now than we’ve ever been.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say, petulantly.

“With all due respect, she’s not your sister. Only me and Lily know what’s between me and Lily. And both of us…” He trails off.

“What?”

“Both of us know what it is to feel like the body you have isn’t always the body you want. I promise not to write any bad songs about it, but Lily’s always going to be part of my life now. We’re not going to make the same mistake again, shut each other out and just assume the other one is trundling along fine. So that means…”

“What? What does that mean?”

“It means that you two, and Fiona, are going to have to accept that.”

And as he says it, a strand of light spreads, wormlike, through my mind. One that, like the night I looked at Fiona and saw the moon shooting through her, is touched with a kind of silver glow. Immediately, I am able to recognize that this is a light coming from Roe, and that it is one I can grab and hold on to, like a rope ladder dangling from a helicopter. Before I even have a chance to speak, I realize that the light is a thought, and the thought is his.

I hope she loves me enough to try.

“Maeve? Did you hear what I said? I think it’s important for Lily to have a group she can immerse in, y’know? A group like ours.”

“So you want Lily to hang out with us, but you also think it’s fine for her to hate me.”

“I’m just saying that you need to give it time. Can you give it time? Time for her to heal, for you guys to work it out, whatever? Then we can be … I don’t know. A foursome.”

“Right,” I grumble. “Earth, Air, Fire, Water.”

“Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, yes.”

“Right.”

I lean my head on his shoulder and wonder just how easy life would be if I weren’t in love with Roe O’Callaghan.

But, oh God, how boring.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

SPRING

FIONA AND