The Cold Cold Sea by Linda Huber Read Free Book Online Page A

do your work. Come on, Maggie.’
    Back at the cottage, the helicopter had gone. Howard had told them it would only be searching at low tide today, and the thought that it would be looking for a dead child felt unreal to Maggie. Yesterday’s agony was gone, along with today’s brief hope, and in their place the new heaviness was making every movement so difficult she didn’t know how she was managing to stay upright. She was moving into uncharted waters now. Whatever happened, her life would never be the same again. And with every second that passed, the already miniscule likelihood of getting Livvy back alive was growing smaller, and the dread of what was almost certainly coming was quite unbearable.
    Colin strode into the bedroom and yanked the case out from under the bed. He pulled clothes from the wardrobe, squashing t-shirts, jeans, everything in any old way. There was no expression on his face now but Maggie could tell by the set of his jaw that he was at the limit of his endurance.
    ‘Col, we can’t leave now,’ she said, standing in the doorway. ‘We have to be here in case... when... ’
    He stared at her, his lips pressed together. He was furious, she could tell, but when he spoke his voice was quiet. Not a gentle kind of quiet, though, but guarded, as if he was afraid of saying too much.
    ‘Maggie, I just can’t look at you and think of what happened. I have to get away. I’m going to Looe, I promised Joe I’d be back before bedtime. You stay on here if you want, or go back to Carlton Bridge. You know they won’t find her alive now.’
    ‘No,’ she said, reaching out to him, but he pushed past her to get his things from the bathroom. ‘Colin. Please. We have to get through this together. Joe needs us to be his... ’
    ‘Livvy needed us too,’ he said, and his use of the past tense hurt her even more than the news that it had been a girl called Meredith she’d spent so long staring at today, not Livvy. She watched as he finished packing and then followed him out to the car. He was going to leave again, and this time he wasn’t going to come back.
    ‘Please, Colin, please don’t go.’
    ‘No, Maggie. I just - I can’t.’
    He flung himself into the driving seat and stabbed the key into the ignition.
    This time she didn’t wave as the car bumped away from the cottage.

Chapter Nine
End of August
    Maggie stood at the kitchen window. She couldn’t see the ocean from here, but she could hear the waves crashing up the beach at the front of the cottage. The tide was going out and it was raining softly, more like mist really. September rain. Or it would be, tomorrow. Shivering, she turned and put the kettle on. The fifteenth of August seemed like a lifetime ago now.
    Maggie dropped a tea bag into the clown mug that Olivia had won at the hoopla last summer. Livvy’s mug, for hot chocolate and bedtime stories. She poured the water in and cradled the mug in both hands. The warmth was comforting, if anything could be comforting now. Drearily, Maggie went through to the living room, and the whole scene at the beach began in her mind yet again, like a never-ending film going round and round, not letting her switch it off. She could smell the seaweed, hear the still distant breakers and the gulls circling and crying above them. She stood at the front room window and stared out over the ocean. The cold, grey sea.
    Waiting for Livvy was all she could do now. Hot tears streaked down her face as she held the mug against her heart, because of course it wasn’t the only thing here to remind her that she’d once had a daughter. Olivia’s blue hair slides were still on the window ledge, and the picture book she’d been leafing through that last morning was lying on a chair that no-one had sat on for two weeks. Maggie turned from the greyness outside and wandered round the cottage.
    Livvy’s beach ball was lying deflated in the corner beside the bookcase. They’d forgotten it on the fifteenth. And her