Under a Silent Moon by Elizabeth Haynes

cheapest. And despite his protests that it didn’t meet his needs, he had chosen this one specifically, which made it all the more frustrating.
    â€œHe says the gears keep slipping,” she’d said.
    They took the bike back to examine it and then phoned Taryn at work to tell her the good news. The gears were fine.
    When she went back to the shop she asked if there was any way she could exchange it for a mountain bike. The manager showed her round the mountain bike selection and told her he would give her a trade-in value for the road bike. Less than half what she’d paid, and the mountain bikes were much more expensive.
    She had wheeled the bike out of the shop and spent another twenty minutes fighting to get it back into her car. Subsequently she chose a Friday lunchtime, when she could be reasonably certain that Barbara would be playing tennis and her father would be at his office, and dumped the bike round the back of the barn. Then put a note through the letterbox, explaining that she couldn’t exchange it, she had tried, and if he wanted to buy himself a mountain bike that was up to him. She had signed it simply “T,” no niceties. And that had been it.
    But she’d been working up to seeing him again, working up to contacting him, knowing that the immovable boundary of Christmas was approaching and that someone would have to break the silence and say something about letting bygones be bygones, blood being thicker than water, the wrong time of year to be holding grudges, all of that old nonsense that would still be directed at her as though she were the guilty party.
    And now Barbara was dead, and her father was breathing through a machine. She tried to feel sorry. She even tried to feel happy, but that didn’t work either. She couldn’t seem to feel anything apart from tired.
    What she had wanted to hear was that he was dead. It was bad of her, very bad, to wish something like that, but it didn’t stop her wishing. And if he was going to die, she wanted it to happen soon so she wouldn’t have to keep going back, day after day. She wanted it to be over with.

Day Two
Friday 2 November 2012
    00:52
    Flora was in a bar in town, numbing everything from her lips to her heart with alcohol and loud music. At some point she would walk back to the studio, sleep there. Not the flat. It was too full of Polly’s presence, the ghost of her.
    Flora could have stayed at the farm; her mother had specifically asked.
    â€œWhat if I need you, Flora?”
    â€œNeed me for what, exactly?” It was like speaking to a petulant child. When she’d been at the wine, their roles were often reversed.
    â€œBut what about the horses?”
    â€œThe horses are fine. Dad’s here, and that Petrie idiot, if you need him.”
    â€œBut Flora . . . Polly . . .”
    More tears. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the tears had been for Polly, but they were selfish ones: Felicity was cross that her life had been thrown upside down, that her home had been invaded by police, that Polly had gone and got herself killed and made such a mess in the cottage. And the only way to deal with it was to make it all about herself.
    Her mother was pathetic, frustrating, but her father was worse. There was a calmness about him that felt dangerous. The more pressure he felt, the more relaxed he seemed, and today, when they had been taking his fingerprints, police in his house, he had been almost casual. Flora knew how his moods worked, how his temper built, masked by the composure, until a point of no return had been reached. Then his fury was explosive.
    Flora left the farm without saying goodbye. They were all busy, anyway.
    She’d been approached in the bar several times, propositioned, turned them away. The last one, a bloke twice her size who had also consumed more than his fair share of alcohol, got aggressive when she turned him down, called her a “frigid fucking