The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

46 : Blaire

B L A I R E

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There's not much better than a hot, flaky croissant, covering my top in flecks of pastry with each bite, melted butter dribbling down my chin. Not the most attractive food to eat, but Sukie doesn't seem to mind. It makes her laugh when she comes over to me between customers, leaning on my table.

"Have you managed to get any of that in your mouth yet?" she asks with a glint in her eye.

"I'm working on it."

"You look good enough to eat."

"Wait until your shift's over," I say, grapping a napkin to wipe my face. She throws me a wink and my stomach flutters, butterflies erupting in my tummy and balloons filling my lungs.

In the two days since Elizabeth found me at the cemetery, I've vowed not to scare anyone again. My phone is constantly charged, and I've been spending almost all of my time either with Elizabeth or Sukie: if I'm not sitting here in the café, doodling and reading – an easy-going romance this time, rather than the book that makes me question my own mortality – then I'm sitting in the armchair in the attic, talking to Elizabeth while she paints.

Now that she's finished her portrait of Mum, one that I can't look away from as much as it saddens me, she's working on a landscape. A stormy depiction of Anchor Lake, turbulent water beneath a heavy sky, the mountains looming in the distance like a threat. I don't know how she does it, how she can create such a vivid sense of a place with a few strokes of her brush, so visceral I feel like I'm standing on the jetty, waiting for the rain.

"I can't put the brush down," she told me earlier, before I left for the café. She told me about her second therapist, the one who asked if she had tried art therapy and opened up a whole world she had never explored. Now it's her fixation, her compulsion. She paints. And I can feel every emotion bubbling beneath the surface.

I'm snapped out of my thoughts when the café bell dings and a police officer walks in, and she locks eyes with me.

My first thought is oh, shit, she's here to tell me something's happened to Elizabeth. But then I realise it's Jacob's mum, and she's smiling. I think. It's kind of hard to tell, but maybe that's just because I don't expect police to smile. It doesn't fit.

She orders a latte and comes to the end of the counter to wait for it, close to my table. I give her a polite smile and turn back to my book – it's getting steamy, and I almost feel bad reading it public. Almost.

"Hi, Blaire," she says.

Oh, so we're talking.

"Hello." How am I supposed to address her? Officer? Mrs Hill? I go with nothing, my sentence ending on a stunted pause.

"How're you doing?"

"Good, thanks." I take a sip of my mocha. My mouth is suddenly drier than the Sahara, my skin itching, though I don't get the same vibes from Jacob's mum as I do from the kid himself. I wonder how he turned out the way he did.

Her drink arrives. She doesn't leave. She thanks Sukie and turns to face me more fully, and I have to make a concerted effort not to cringe.

"I..." She trails off and takes off her hat, running a hand over her short hair. "I wanted to apologise to you, for what Jacob said to you at the book club."

"Oh." I wasn't expecting that.

"I've told him before to give it a rest, but he's got a bit too obsessed with that book," she says. "He's not very challenged by school; I think he's needed something else to get stuck into, and he found Sukie's podcast." She holds her hat in both hands, rubbing her thumbs over the chequered band.