I Am Watching by Emma Kavanagh

Author:Emma Kavanagh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2019-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

An opportunity – Mina

Mina stood alone in the empty street, the cold night air pricking at her fingers, her face. The cloud cover was complete now; the threat of rain sitting just beyond the horizon. It felt as if she was wrapped in cotton wool, clouds pressing down on her from above. Down the hill and in the near distance, the moor was lost to a heavy mist.

She looked at the front door of her tiny terraced cottage. Her skin felt sticky with exhaustion; the need to take a shower, to climb into a freshly made bed was almost palpable. And yet still she stood there. It was, Mina was prepared to admit, perhaps not the wisest of moves, given the current climate.

She turned and began walking slowly away from the safety of her own front door and the small comfort of simply being able to stop. She couldn’t stop. It wasn’t over.

She walked past the church, took a left, around the florist’s, down the hill past the now empty primary school, with its dark stone, high turreted towers, down and down until the mist that sat on the moor seemed to reach out to her, filling her lungs. She took a right along a narrow side street containing terraced houses larger than hers and yet small for all that.

She walked and walked, number twelve, number thirteen. Number fourteen. There Mina stopped.

The Aiken house. Or what had been the Aiken house, at least.

The house nestled within a row of like-minded houses. They had been added to the ancient village maybe forty or so years ago, when it had finally become apparent to Briganton that expansion was the only path to survival. Three bedrooms, according to the files, hardly sufficient room to house three growing boys, and yet house them it had. At least until one of them had been murdered, another escaping by the skin of his teeth. From there it had been a steep slope of decay. The mother dead within two years, the father resolved seemingly to drink himself into oblivion. Cain and Ramsey moving out, away, and then, as all things seemed to do in Briganton, ricocheting back again to settle, seemingly pulled by a past that would not let them go.

Mina studied the house. It had been tarted up, a double extension added to the back of it, a new gravel driveway laid at the front. Simply looking at it, you would never know what had happened there, would never sense the tragedy that had unfolded.

That was the front door. That was the path down which they had walked.

Mina looked at her feet, puddled in the orange glow of a streetlamp. They would have stood here, not knowing what was to come. Then they would have walked along this road, Zach delivering papers to house after house, then a left, then a right.

Mina turned and began to walk, the first whispers of rain pricking at her skin.

The mist was denser here, the moor just a house width away.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.