Chapter One

      December 2004

       Maybe they’ll be merciful, Megan McAllister thought as she hung Christmas decorations onto the same Christmas tree they’d had every year since she could remember. Old Piney spent the year out in the garden, and was cruelly uprooted every December and brought into the sweltering heat of the living room, with the log fire crackling, almost as a warning of what happened to bad trees. It was starting to look like it was suffering. It wasn’t the only one.

       Maybe they’d see it as a Christmas miracle, and look to the kindness and understanding of the people of Bethlehem when she told them. But she doubted it somehow.

       She was meant to be off to Cambridge, to read English. She was meant to go off and do great things. She’d only just got her head around the idea of being independent, leaving their little village for a proper town. Leaving Lucas behind. And now…well, none of that really mattered any more, did it?

       She paused, looking at the decoration she’d picked up. A red clay hand imprint, heavy and solid, with ‘Megan’s first Christmas’ marker-penned across the front.

      Oh shit.

      ***

      ‘I don’t want to go, Anna.’

      Skye heard her mother’s voice, arguing with her great-aunt. Skye was meant to be in bed, but Auntie Anna tended to let it slide if she was quiet or reading. Anna let a lot of things go for reading. Especially if Skye then recited something impressive from Shakespeare or a Wilde play. Anna was ‘wild for Wilde’, as she loved to say.

      ‘Darling, it’s important,’ Anna drawled, and Skye could imagine her sucking on her thin black cigarette holder, tracing the edges of her heavily lined lashes.

      Her mum used to say Anna was a ‘theatre darling’ and ‘a bit of a cliché’, but Skye didn’t really think it was fair to call someone a cliché just because they enjoyed what they enjoyed. It was like when people called her precocious because she liked exact words and actions. Nothing wrong with that. For the most part, Anna was just eccentric, with her big jewellery and dramatic hand gestures.

      ‘What’s different now? She summons us and we have to come running? She’s wanted nothing to do with us for ten years, Anna.’

      ‘You know that’s not true, darling,’ Anna shushed her. They must have been talking about her grandma, Skye realised, because that was the only time her mum and Anna argued. Well, that and the time Skye had snuck into the fridge and had a bite of Anna’s special chocolate brownie that tasted weird, and she’d had to lie down for hours. Mum had been pretty mad about that.

      ‘Reminding me that you’re acting as her little spy is hardly going to endear me right now,’ Megan said pointedly.

      ‘She cares, my love, really,’ Anna said gently, and Megan stayed silent. ‘It’s taken ten years for her to reach out, don’t be stubborn and let it take ten more.’

      ‘You want me to be the bigger person?’ Megan asked.

      ‘I want you to do this for me,’ Anna said heavily, ‘and I want you to do it for Skye. She needs more people in her life than her mother, an ageing actress and a young queen.’

      ‘Jeremy’s hardly a queen.’

      ‘He does drag five nights a week, what else would you call him?’

      ‘A very talented actor?’

      Anna sighed. ‘You and your delicate sensibilities, darling. I do wish you’d stop being such a goody two shoes all the time.’

      Megan laughed bitterly. ‘I’m a single mother. My parents disowned me. I’m entirely too dependent on an evening gin and tonic, and I haven’t had a relationship in ten years.’

      ‘And you’re so bloody saintly about it all.’

      ‘Would you rather I’d run off and joined a biker gang? Or the circus! That would have been a good story, Skye could be a contortionist by now, or riding elephants for the crowds,’ Megan babbled on. ‘Maybe I would have stopped waxing, become a bearded lady, married the moustached strong man…’

      ‘Darling, I just meant perhaps you could stop punishing yourself for something that happened ten years ago, and has actually worked out pretty well,’ Anna sighed. ‘You are so very like your mother sometimes.’

      Megan gasped. ‘If you’re going to say things like that I hope to hell you’ve made Sangria.’

      Skye heard Anna sigh. ‘I made hot toddy instead. Look, I know you take such delight in being indignant and proud all the time, but from one black sheep to another, sometimes it gets a little cold out here.’

      Megan was silent, and Skye could imagine her blowing on her drink, the steam curling out and warming her face.

      ‘I’ll think about it,’ Megan said quietly.

      Did her mum want a relationship? Skye had never really questioned their life together, it just was. And what was wrong with a grown-up having a gin and tonic if they wanted it? Her mum was a good mum.

      Skye crept back up the stairs and into her room, crawling across the floor to slide into her fort, which was where she did all her Big Detective Thinking. Skye was going to be a private investigator when she grew up, and her fort housed all her tools for the job. The fort was really just strips of old faded pastel print sheets Megan had sewn together, decorated with fairy lights and turned into a tipi. Skye loved it.

      She supposed her life looked strange to other people. Certainly to Britney and Chanel and that group of girls at school that always wanted to know why she didn’t have a dad. When kids came round to the house, they always used to ask if Jeremy was her dad. Sometimes she said yes. When he babysat her, back when Mum used to work nights and Anna was at the theatre, Jeremy would let her play with his glittery make-up, and curl her hair up so she looked like Shirley Temple. The problem with saying Jeremy was her dad was that eventually all her friends fell in love with him, because he had this silky blond hair, and bright blue eyes, and this lovely smile that made everyone smile back.

      Besides, it was wrong to lie. Her real dad was a nice enough man that wasn’t good at being a dad, but that was okay, because Mum was very good at being a mum. That’s what Anna said, anyway. Skye knew there was more to it than that. She knew that her mum was prettier and smarter and younger than all the other parents. That her friends’ dads used to act weird around her mum, and the mums never invited her