I’ve been quite mad with worry. No one at all knew where you’d disappeared to.’ Ava kissed Lydia on both cheeks, but despite her words she did not look agitated or overly concerned. ‘What happened to your face?’ Lydia gasped, shocked. Ava had become used to her beaten appearance and forgot that it was startling. Shocking. Initially she’d been macabrely drawn to every looking glass in the house; she couldn’t stop examining the violence, couldn’t stop thinking about it. But she was pretty sure that the cut on her lip was healing reasonably well, and she was able to open her mouth again properly. For a day or so eating had been difficult; her jaw ached, and if she chewed vigorously, she opened the cut where her top lip met her bottom one. Her temple was still tender, and she suspected that injury might leave a scar; she’d had another headache this morning. She’d watched as the bruises lost their angry red hue and rushed through a kaleidoscope of colours; at first they had darkened to a bluish purple which, despite the fact that Ava was far from the romantic sort and rarely subject to silly notions, she could not help but compare to the colour of forget-me-nots.
