Chapter 19: No

Elliot's POV

I do not own a screen bigger than my hand.

That was why the three men from the yard had carried a laptop into the boat shed.

They set it on an upturned crate.

The one with nine fingers wiped the dust off it with his sleeve.

Poppy slept on a cot in the corner with a blanket to her chin and the stitched lamb under her arm.

I had told Sadie I would stay with Poppy, and I would have stayed anywhere she asked.

At eight o'clock the screen lit up, and there was a bare white room, and Bree.

She sat in a chair with her hands folded, in a cream cardigan, with the sea in a framed photograph behind her.

"Hello, my loves," she said.

It was Sadie's voice.

I had heard the real one in my kitchen and in the dark, and I knew every breath of it.

This was a good copy, and it was still a copy.

One of the old men whispered a word I will not write.

Bree went on in that borrowed voice, soft and tired and sorry.

She said she had missed them.

She said she had been through a hard season.

The numbers in the corner of the screen climbed past a million and kept going.

Then Sadie walked into the frame.

She wore the gray suit.

She stood beside the chair and put her hand on the back of it.

For a second the two of them were side by side, the one speaking and the one silent.

"Oh," Bree said, in her own voice now, light and pleased. "She's here. Everyone, she's really here."

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