A Part of Me and You: An empowering and incredibly moving novel that will make you laugh and cry. Emma Heatherington

       Chapter 8

       Shelley

      Merlin and I are approaching the end of the sand dunes about halfway up the beach, which normally tells him it’s time to turn to go home, but to my surprise he darts off in a direction he never ventures, sniffing and yelping lightly as he climbs one of the sand dunes. For the first time in my many years of walking this beach, I can feel my heart flutter in fear of what may have got his attention.

      Then I hear something, a whimper through the rain in the distance.

      What on earth could it be? It’s someone crying and it sounds like a child. Oh God. Am I hearing things in this awful rain?

      ‘Lily?’ I call out, then cover my mouth with my hand when I realise what I just did. I am losing my mind. I am hearing things. Oh God, help me. But the crying … is real and it’s coming from somewhere beyond Merlin.

      Yet still I can only hear Lily. I hear her cry just like I did that day – close enough to hear her but far enough for me to be too late. It’s not Lily, I know it’s not her but I can hear and I can’t bring myself to ignore it. I look back towards my house in the distance, the yellow lights coming from the kitchen window, and the lighthouse across the bay. Someone is in trouble and I can’t just run and hide. I need to try and help.

      I pull the strings tight on my hood as the rain comes down in buckets, drenching my hands and running down my face, and I cagily follow Merlin towards the sand dunes, calling his name to come back, hoping that I am imagining things, hearing things as I often do.

      ‘Merlin! Merlin, come back here! Merlin!’

      He darts on, up to the top of the sand dune, still barking, and I slip and slide in the mushy sand, balancing myself as I stumble up. I hear the sobbing more loudly now and it comes from underneath a large green golf umbrella. I freeze. I don’t know who it is or what I should do and then I see a hand reach out for the dog and hear a young voice greet him amidst the sobs.

      ‘Hello there, you!’ the voice of what appears to be a little girl with an English accent says, so I approach her, coughing to announce my presence and trying to make some noise over the sounds of the rain so that I don’t scare her.

      ‘Excuse me? Are you okay?’

      I walk around to the other side of the umbrella to find her huddled up with a sodden paper bag of chips by her side, which Merlin is now helping himself to but the girl doesn’t seem to mind.

      I look at her. My heart stops.

      ‘Lily?’ I say.

      ‘What?’

      Oh God. What am I saying? I’m seeing things again. Please don’t let this happen again! I can’t keep seeing Lily in every child I see.

      ‘I’m so … I’m so sorry if I frightened you,’ I say to her over the rain. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

      My heart starts to beat faster. She looks up at me with familiar eyes and I stumble backwards, squinting to make sure what or who I am looking at is real.

      I can’t keep doing this. Eliza has tried to coach me through this and Matt has calmed me down when I have come home before convinced I saw her somewhere, or when I wake up in the night in cold sweats believing that it’s all just a horrible nightmare and she is at home safe and sound and I go to her room calling her name to find an empty bed. And here I go again letting my mind wander. But this is not Lily. This is a teenage girl who looks nothing like Lily. It is not my dead daughter. My daughter was only three years old, for goodness’ sake.

      ‘It looks like you’re the one who’s frightened,’ the girl replies in a choked-up voice that isn’t as tough as she wants it to be. ‘What did you call me?’

      ‘Me?’ I mutter.

      ‘Yes, you,’ she says. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Oh, just leave me alone.’

      She is about fifteen or sixteen, I guess, and her dark hair is tucked behind her ears but it’s the familiar sadness in her young eyes, dripping black with mascara, that takes my breath away. The fear, the worry, the anger, the pain … she looks away which allows me to compose myself.

      ‘I’m sorry, I don’t normally sneak up on people like this,’ I say to her. I should really just do what she says and leave her alone but what if I do that and then hear later that something awful has happened to her out here.

      ‘That’s good,’ she says with a snigger. ‘You should try minding your own business. Everyone should.’

      ‘It’s just,’ I try to explain. ‘Well, my dog, Merlin, well, he never leaves my side for too long so I had to follow him and then I heard you and … please just tell me, are you okay? Can I do anything?’

      She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have.

      ‘Can I help you at all?’ I try again. ‘You’re going to catch your death up here. It’s pouring down.’

      ‘Who are you, my mother?’ she says with attitude and her words and tone take me back in time again. ‘I have one of those, thank you very much, and one is quite enough.’

      ‘No, no, I’m not your mother, no, but I’m sure your own mother is worried about you?’ I realise that I must sound exactly like a mother, her mother.

      ‘Look,’ says the little English voice with the big dark eyes. ‘Just take your lovely dog for a walk and leave me alone before you catch your death. And why is everything about death these days? You don’t know anything about my mother so just leave it, will you?’

      ‘Well, no I don’t know your mother, but—’

      ‘She thinks no one knows anything about her,’ says the girl. ‘But I know more than she thinks I do. I’m not stupid. I just don’t know what the hell I’m doing here and I want to go home so she can die back there instead! No point dying here where no one knows her, is there?’

      So, her mother is dying. Oh no. Oh, this poor little girl.

      She cries openly now and wipes her face on the back of the sleeves of her sodden jacket. I sit down beside her. I don’t think twice about it and I don’t notice the rain anymore. I just sit.

      ‘Just go away and mind your own business,’ says the girl. ‘You don’t have to feel sorry for me. I seem to be doing a good enough job of that myself, thank you very much.’

      I should really go and do what she says, but I don’t. I wait. I stay.

      ‘I don’t want to go just yet, if you don’t mind,’ I tell her, not knowing where this urge to stay with her is coming from.

      I normally walk straight past strangers these days. The old me would have stopped and helped a stranger, but not the me after Lily died. These days I normally don’t take time to care. I don’t take time to care because I usually don’t care – but this time, I do.

      ‘And you didn’t scare me at all actually,’ I continue. ‘You remind me of someone that I know very well and it startled me, that’s all.’

      She looks at me like I’ve just sprouted two horns at the suggestion that she could possibly remind me of someone. Imagine.

      ‘Well I don’t know anyone around