THE HEIR'S REVENGE

chapter 62

The wind moved through the oak trees above us.

"I want you to know that I know who you were," I said. "Not just who you were to me. Who you actually were. You were Richard Blackwell's daughter. You were from a family that loved you and searched for you for eleven years after you disappeared. Your father never stopped looking for you. He spent his whole life trying to find you and when he was dying he used his last weeks to find me so that I would have what you should have had."

I stopped.

Something moved in my chest that I held carefully.

"You never knew any of that," I said. "That is the thing I cannot fix. You lived your whole life not knowing that you were wanted. Not knowing that you had a name that mattered and a father who was looking for you and a family that had been missing you since the day you disappeared." I paused. "You cleaned their floors and cooked their food and you never knew."

Lily pressed closer to my side.

I put my arm around her.

"But I know now," I said. "And I made sure everyone else knows too. Your name is on a court record. Your story is in newspapers. The whole city knows what was done to you and who did it and that you deserved better than what you got." I paused. "The world knows your name Mum. Sarah Blackwell. They know who you were."

The light was coming up slowly over the cemetery walls. Pale and clear. The kind of early morning light that made everything look like it was just beginning.

"I want to tell you about Lily," I said. I looked down at her beside me. She looked up at me with those emerald eyes. "She is six years old and she is the bravest person I have ever met and she calls me brother like she has called me her whole life." I paused.

"She has a rabbit with emerald eyes and she has very specific opinions about the colour purple and she can tell the difference between blue purple and pink purple and she thinks the blue morpho butterfly is the best butterfly in the world." I stopped. "She made sixty of them rise into the air on her birthday and she stood in the middle of the garden with her face turned up watching them go and she looked like someone who had decided that the world was a good place after all."

Lily made a very small sound beside me.

I kept going.

"She lost her parents when she was two," I said. "She grew up without them the same way I grew up without you. But she is not broken by it. She is just herself. Completely and fully herself. And she gave me something I did not know I needed, which was someone to come home to." I paused. "You would have loved her. She would have driven you absolutely crazy with her questions and you would have loved every single minute of it."

I stopped talking.

The cemetery was quiet around us.

Lily had turned her face into my side so I could not see her expression. Her shoulders were very still in the way that meant she was concentrating very hard on not crying.

I held her tighter.

"I kept my promise," I said quietly. "The one I made you in the study the night I found Dr Chen's evidence. I told you I was going to make them remember you by becoming someone you would be proud of." I paused. "I tried Mum. I really tried. And I think I got most of the way there."

I waited.

“I know I'm not there yet but I will be soon.”

I stood there with my arm around Lily and the white flowers on the grave..

After a while Lily moved.

She stepped forward carefully and crouched down in front of the headstone the way she crouched down to look at interesting things on the ground. She opened the small paper bag she had been carrying.

She took out a drawing.

She had made it the night before. I had not known she was making it but she had. She placed it carefully against the base of the headstone and straightened it twice to make sure it was not crooked.

I looked at the drawing.

It was a drawing of two figures holding hands. One tall and the other small. Above them she had drawn sixty tiny shapes with her purple crayon. Small and careful and each one slightly different from the others.

Butterflies.

Sixty of them rise above the two figures in a purple cloud.

Lily stood up and stepped back and looked at the drawing against the headstone.

She did not explain it, I mean she did not need to. I looked at the drawing for a long time, then at the headstone.

"Okay," Lily said quietly beside me.

I looked at her. "She heard you," she said simply.

I looked at her face. Serious and certain and six years old.

"How do you know?" I asked.

She thought about it for a moment. "Because the wind moved when you stopped talking," she said. "Like it was answering."

I looked at the oak trees. They were still no but the wind had moved. I noticed too.

I did not know if Lily was right. I did not know if any of it worked the way she thought it worked or if the wind was just the wind and the stillness was just the stillness.

But standing there in the early morning light with the frost on the grass and the white flowers and the drawing of sixty butterflies I felt something that I had not felt in a very long time.

I felt relief and peace. The quiet deep feeling of something being exactly as it should be.

"Come on," I said to Lily.

I held out my hand.

She took it.

We walked back down the frost path together toward the car. Our footsteps crunching in the quiet. The city begins to wake up beyond the walls. The morning is coming up properly now over Crestwood.

At the gate I stopped and looked back once.

The headstone was visible from the gate. White in the morning light. The drawing is still against it.