Moonlight Rising by Craven Johanna

Author:Craven, Johanna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

*

“Well, this is an interesting costume, Thea,” says Eva.

Harriet wants to smack that forced brightness right out of her. She’s surprised by her sudden fury at her sister. Or perhaps she’s not. Because really, honestly, she has been angry at Eva for weeks. Furious at her for flying out of their lives and leaving Harriet to face her starched and stilted marriage alone.

This was not how it was supposed to be. This life as Edwin’s wife, it was supposed to be tolerable because she had Eva beside her. Nathan and Edwin and Matthew would gallivant around the coffee houses, and she and Eva would hide themselves away to gossip about their beastly, uptight husbands, and everything would be all right.

“I’m a selkie,” says Theodora. “Half a seal and half a girl.”

Eva gives her a stiff smile, painfully obvious in not looking Harriet’s way. “Very good. Read us the story then.”

Eva is impossibly twitchy today. Harriet does not like it. It makes her feel there is something her sister is hiding.

Theodora looks down at the papers in her hand, the blanket sliding from her shoulders and pooling at her feet. She picks it up awkwardly with one hand and drapes it back over her shoulder. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “there was an old man and his wife who lived by the sea. The man was a fisherman, and one day he rescued a seal who was trapped in his net. But it was not just a seal. It was a magical selkie who turned into a lady when she climbed out of the water.”

Harriet sighs, louder than she had intended, and receives a brisk kick in the foot from Eva. She grits her teeth.

Being around her sister, Harriet realises, it makes her feel abandoned. Betrayed. And beneath it all is that which Harriet has been doing her best not to acknowledge: that thick, searing pull of jealousy.

Because impossibly, unfathomably, Harriet wishes she were Eva.

She cannot believe she feels this way. As soon as she was old enough to do more than trail after her like a blindly doting little sister, Harriet had seen Eva as dour and dull. A rigid follower of the rules, dreamless and hemmed-in by expectation. That fact that her colourless sister might be living this impossible sea-drenched life is too much to take in. Especially when Harriet knows that Eva also has the kind of love that Harriet will never have. Can never have.

Eva has told her none of this, of course. But she doesn’t need to. Harriet can see it in her eyes. Can see it in the way she and Finn exchange those wordless, doting glances when they think no one is watching. It makes something burn in Harriet’s chest; a thorny mix of jealousy and grief.

At least, she thinks, she is still capable of feeling something.

“And on the moon,” says Theodora, “the fisherman’s wife found mountains that looked like a castle. And holes that were made when a rock crashed into it.”

Suddenly the thought comes to her, fervent and fierce.

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