Published by Moonlit Window Press PART ONE WAKE CHAPTER ONE Promise Amy I stand near the edge of the cliff, the lights from Promise House making the long grass around my ankles glow pale yellow. I can hear the sea below as it crashes against the rocks with an angry roar repeated over and over in a hypnotic rhythm. This is how my Aunt Bethany died. She fell from a cliff during her nightly walk. Not here, not this cliff just behind her house her house. But somewhere close by. And now I am alone. All alone. The people in the house are strangers. They were part of Aunt B’s life here in Cornwall while my mother and I were living in the States. They know me only as “Bethany’s sister’s girl” or “the niece who went to America”. Some of them say they remember me from when I was a child ‘tearing through Promise House like a little whirlwind’ and from the times Mom and I came over to visit Aunt B. But I don’t remember them. I am among strangers. Even Frank and his daughter Julie, the people I have lived with for the last six years - five of them with Mom and one on my own - seem distant.
