The Family Friend C. MacDonald (reading comprehension books .txt) 📖

and answered the door. She’d never met him before as she never left her flat after he got back from work. She started shouting at him, threatening to call the police. He told me we’d have to leave that night. I felt terrible, but he was so lovely about it, he didn’t blame me even though I knew it was my fault. He went out to get everything sorted and we came straight here.

And now we’re in a little one-bed house that has a creek ten minutes’ walk away and it feels like when we were getting to know each other again. Donny’s still commuting into the city and, for the moment at least, he thinks it’s best if I stay inside when he’s not here. He’s put a CCTV camera above the door so we’ll have evidence if Craig finds us here, but I can’t see how he ever will.

I was having doubts. It feels almost sacrilegious, with everything we’ve been through in the last year, to say that, but I did. Our love felt so intense, so pure, it made me feel alive, but when we moved to the city I started to feel as if he thought he’d made a mistake. He seemed so stressed all the time, so paranoid. But now I’ve got the old Donny back. So loving, so tender. And I feel like our world is everything again. And that’s important. People spend their lives striving for money and career, to get married, to have children. But for what? He and I have to put something important in the world. We’re on a voyage together. And that’s the operative word. Together. Soulmate is a cliché now. But if you find that person who can be enough to satisfy every craving, every desire you have, when you find perfection, you have to do everything to maintain it and never let it go.

He says he still wants me to be the mother of his children. Now he can see what our life can be like, simple, pure, he can see that for us soon.

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn and I see now that that’s all it was in Darwin. We’re safe now. I’m safe.

49

‘Hi, is that Cariad?’

‘To whom am I speaking?’

‘Hi, it’s Erin Braune. Anna Mai’s friend?’

‘Oh. Oh, hello.’

‘I got your mobile number from my agent. Grace Fentiman.’

‘I have an appointment in a couple of minutes.’

‘This won’t take long. I wanted to thank you for your message identifying what all the different crystals in the picture were, but I was wondering if you could help me work out what they’re all, you know, arranged in that pattern, what they’re actually set up to do.’

‘Crystals are ciphers of energy. It would be impossible to say exactly what any arrangement is trying to heal.’ Cariad sounds tense, not pleased to be cold-called like this. Erin expected her to be nurturing, to have a voice like a children’s presenter, but she’s not like that at all. She nudges Bobby’s buggy with her knee. They’re on the seafront. He’s not asleep but the movement seems to stop him crying.

‘I’ve googled the individual stones from your message and it seems they could be anything really. Friendship, love, empowerment, confidence. I was just wondering if you could make it more specific for me.’

‘This isn’t your grid.’

‘It isn’t, no.’

‘Crystals are very personal.’

‘They belong to someone who looks after my son and I’m concerned she could mean him harm.’

‘Crystals don’t allow you to imbue them with any negative energy. I promise you, this grid is not designed to harm anyone. The opposite if anything.’

‘What does that mean?’ Cariad gives a hearty sigh. There’s a pause. Erin can hear her moving some things around on the other end of the line.

‘Is your baby very attached to you?’

‘Yes. Yes he is.’ Erin’s not sure why she had to answer so vehemently. She glances down at Bobby who is looking up at her with a dreamy admiration.

‘Rhodochrosite has the power to bewitch. It bonds people. Binds them. Garnet has a very sexual energy but, combined with the quartz and the rhody, I’d say it was there to rekindle a destroyed relationship. Rose quartz is the heart stone. It’s love. Pure love. So perhaps she’s trying to improve her bond with your son.’ Erin opens her eyes wide and stares out as a swarm of seagulls swoop across the horizon. ‘It’s a very powerful arrangement, I was impressed when I saw the picture.’ Erin hears Cariad, but she’s not listening any more. She thanks the healer and lets her get back to her appointment.

She leans back on the bench she’s sitting on, dazed by what Cariad’s just told her. Bobby wriggles out of his blanket and she pulls it up over him. She takes off her scarf and lays it over Bobby’s lower half. His tiny fingers bat at the felt animal on the buggy-mobile above him. Erin looks up and sees a crescent moon in the afternoon sky. An empty container ship out at sea. ‘It is the star to every wand’ring bark.’ A line of Shakespeare pops into her head at the exact moment that Erin realises that all her fears about Amanda and Bobby, all her concern about someone taking pictures of her, have clouded her against what Amanda’s really here for.

‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds,’ she recites to Bobby. She knows the poem by heart – she spent a whole term on Shakespeare’s sonnets. ‘Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds / Or bends with the remover to remove. / O no! It is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wand’ring bark.’ She stops and sees Bobby’s fallen asleep. She wraps her arms around her body and speaks the words to herself, ‘Love alters not