A Single Breath by Lucy Clarke

Author:Lucy Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

SHE SITS AT THE table opposite Saul. There is a smooth white pebble on top of a pile of mail, and a book spread open about cloud formations. She runs her thumbs along the edge of the table, thinking.

Jackson had a child. A son, Saul tells her, called Kyle. He is three years old. Eva works out that Kyle would have been nine or ten months old when Jackson left for England.

She thinks of the baby she lost and how, even before it had been born, she had already begun to love it. She flattens her hands against the table, the wasp sting just a dull ache now. “How could he leave his own child?”

Saul doesn’t answer.

In delivery rooms she’d watched fathers fall in love with their children; she’d seen the way their eyes grew damp as they cradled them for the first time; she’d heard whispered, choked words of welcome and love—and she thinks, I did not know my husband.

She tries to recall whether there were any signs that Jackson had been in touch with his son through Jeanette, but she can’t think of any; no private phone calls or e-mails, no photo slipped into his belongings. But the idea that he had no contact with Jeanette and therefore, Kyle, is worse than believing that he had.

He’d always talked about wanting a family. Two girls, he’d said.

Eva looks at Saul. “You said Jeanette lives in Tasmania still.”

“Yeah, in Warrington, in the northeast.”

“Did Jackson live there with her?”

He nods. “I never visited them, but I know the area. It’s a remote town on the coast—mostly just farmland. Jackson had a job in a pub, Dad said.”

She tries to picture Jackson living somewhere isolated and rural and it surprises her given his love for the city. But then, so much has surprised her. “Have you met her? Jeanette.”

Saul draws his hands to the edge of the table and looks up at Eva. “She’s the one,” he says, his gaze darkening. “The woman Jackson and I fell out over.”

It takes a moment for this to register. Jeanette was the woman Saul had been in love with, the same woman who had left him for Jackson.

Now it begins to make sense why the brothers never made up. Not only did Jackson take Jeanette, but he married her, too. They had a child. How could Saul bear to watch all that?

She thinks about this faceless woman who was the mother of Jackson’s child and a sharp flash of pure jealousy seizes her: Jeanette had a child with Jackson.

Eva’s child died.

She keeps her gaze on Saul and asks, “Will you tell me about her?”

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