CHAPTER 3
“Take a seat. Please”

He slumped into one of the armchairs, setting his briefcase upright on the floor beside him, where it promptly fell over.

“Harry… “

He stopped abruptly, looking down at his clenched hands, then slowly relaxed his fingers before looking back up at the two of us on the settee.

“There have been rumours, you know. I wasn’t sure… Short form, then. Mary, could I have that tea after all? Please?”

She brought an extra mug from the kitchen, and the three of us sat silently as she poured and handed him the cup.

“What do I call you? Harry seems a bit awkward”

“What everyone else does”

“Ellie? I always did wonder about why you pushed that one. Bit too glib, I thought, and I was right, wasn’t I? So, please, executive summary”

I looked quickly at my wife, then jumped in. Soonest humiliated, soonest over.

“Lots of cliché stuff, really, so I won’t go into the usual rigmarole”

CHAPTER 15
I had indeed been squeaky new when I had met Hira, just settling in at the Cardiff hub as I was. I had realised early on in my training that while I was competent at driving the big box of an ambulance, I didn’t have the spatial awareness of someone like Tom, who seemed almost to wear the vehicle like a second skin. My forte was that of an advanced nurse practitioner, with extra trauma skills, so I concentrated on those aspects. It meant a lot of mixing and matching crews for a long time, but eventually Tom and I gelled.

CHAPTER 14
I did the honours with the fresh bottle, and when Ox had popped my cork, I returned to our table, where Hira was interrogating the others.

“So it is the tall man who is the baker?”

Alicia was taking question point.

“Yes, as in he is the one with the bakery, over to Cathays. Nana Deb’s his wife, and she runs a, well, a girls’ home. That’s where I live”

The Ghost of Tomorrow

Chapter 2: Home Truths

That night I had a vivid dream. You know, one of those dreams where
you think you’re awake until you wake up? In this dream, I woke up, and
grabbed the clothes that Mum had laid out in my bedroom to get dressed
into and went into the bathroom. Just a normal school morning. Only when
I took off my pyjamas, two things finally dawned on me. Okay, well
three. No four.

As Samantha grows closer to the children and volunteers at Willow House, Samuel begins to find unexpected meaning in the role—just as the secret edges dangerously close to home.

The Ghost of Tomorrow

Chapter 1: Aftermath

It’s the first Monday in February 1983, and I’m looking in the mirror
of the dresser that Dad dug up at a garage sale last year, after Mariska
kept complaining about me hogging hers. I’m in my light green checked
summer uniform dress, and I’m fiddling with my hair. Finding a style
that keeps my curls under control, out of my face, and won’t
make me look like a weirdo has had me fretting all week. Never mind that

A continuation of ‘Vanishing Point’

CHAPTER 1
It had been a long drive back to Booker, through the familiar stop-go around the M25 until we lost most of the traffic on the M40. Mary had looked at me as I sat next to her, the sundress riding up over my thighs, and tutted.

“Put my coat over those legs. It’ll take a while for the heater to warm us up. And… I need to think, but I need to concentrate. Can’t do both”

On Monday, August 14, I tried to summon Aries and bring myself to the world of the Sea Men again, but as Jody this time. It didn’t quite work, though. I arrived in the world, but I was sleeping alone on the beach and the doll was just a doll, in my house. I decided that this answered one of my questions about the power in one of the ways I thought might be true. I could not summon Aries today because I was trying to summon her into a world where she already exists, even though that was some distance from here.