The Secret Keeper

by Kate Morton

It’s something in the way the vegetable patch has been laid out, just so, at the back of the house, the proud gleam of the leadlight windows, the careful patching of the roofing tiles.

A wheelbarrow loaded with pots waits patiently by the shed.

There were moments, Laurel solemnly believed, in which a person reached a crossroads, when something happened, out of

the blue, to change the course of life’s events.

daisy she and Ma had planted over the poor, dead body of Constable the cat, the chink in the bricks where, embarrassingly, she used to leave notes for the fairies.

She also knew that was where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.

So much of her mother’s past was made up of black spots.

The landscape of one’s childhood was more vibrant than any other. It didn’t matter where it was or what it looked like, the sights and sounds imprinted differently from those encountered later. They became part of a person, inescapable.

The thought came suddenly: the house remembered her.

The house was proud and she was lonely, the sort of place that fed on children’s laughter, and a family’s love, and the smell of rosemary lamb roasting in the oven. She had good, honest bones and a willingness to look forwards rather than backwards, to welcome a new family and grow with them, to embrace their brand-new traditions. It struck Laurel now, as it hadn’t before, that her mother’s description of the house might have been a self-portrait.

Because people who’d led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

“Never discount the possibility of turning up an answer none of the current theories predicts.”

One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.

“Narcissism?” “—in particular the role of fantasy as a defense mechanism. He noticed that some of the things Ma said and did as a teenager tallied with the list of traits he was working on. Nothing over the top, just a certain level of self-absorption, a need to be admired, a tendency to see herself as exceptional, dreams