Being raised in care didn’t actually mean care. There weren’t enough caring people to go around.
But there were plenty of supposed empaths.
Rose’s own gift at seeing people’s pain was the result of it. She’d always thought it was half magic, but she finally realised that life had taught her to thin-slice people expertly.
It was a technique whereby one noted every facial and emotional tic, every word, every syllable, every roll of the eyes, every sliver of contempt until you could tell exactly what sort of person was in front of you.
Most people had to train to do this but, after her childhood, Rose is an expert.
After that, it’s about how you help other people to heal.
She was lucky, she knows. She’d been in care all her young life and she’d had some lovely foster parents. Some mediocre ones.
None of them ever lasted.
Now Rose knows it’s a hellish job to do and that foster parents burn out.
Rose has been Rose Talisman for so long that she can barely recall being Alys Rosemarie Flint.
Flint is a harsh name and names have meaning.
Rose has always understood this. Little Alys Flint had been raised without so much.
Without real parents and, for a very long time, without much in the way of love or kindness.
Sometimes, when she’d been on the TV show and people came to her with families so broken and damaged that they seemed unfixable, Rose would wish she could hold their hands and tell them that she really understood.
You can escape, she’d have said.I did.
But she’d said nothing. Not to them, not to her beloved Theo. Nobody knew. Holding on to her secret was insurance against the past emerging.
Rose understood trauma because she’d grown up in it.
There was nothing to beat the lived experience to understand pain.
Her way out of that trauma came from her vast ability to learn.
She learned that education could help her clamber out of the world of foster parents and damaged foster siblings.
When she hit eighteen, she’d changed her name and magicked up a French mother and a background in the Auvergne, a rural part of France.
Nobody searching for Rosemary Talisman would ever find the remnants of little Alys Flint who’d been in fourteen foster homes before the age of ten.
Nor would they find her little adopted sister. After everything they’d gone through together, Rose would keep Adriana safe no matter what.
Dan sits on the sand waiting for India and stares into the sea. There’s the lightest of breezes down here on the beach, andthe beach goat has already come up to say hello, bumped Dan in the ribs, and then wandered off when it was obvious that Dan had nothing for him to eat.
Now Dan’s trying to sit cross-legged on the sand, a position he finds hard to hold but Julia makes him do it because it’s ‘good for your hips, babes’.
She’s hyper flexible so she can do anything bendy, but Dan’s a cycling man and the sort of muscles that help him power up hills mean his muscles are taut rather than lean and stretchy like Julia’s.
It always comes back to Julia, doesn’t it? Always.
His mind goes to one of their last big rows. He’s in the faculty meeting; they’re discussing the car parking. The faculty is always discussing car parking.
Dan is not interested because he does not drive into college. His daily routine involves cycling four miles from his two-bedroom redbrick, hauling the Boardman SLR 8.9 Disc up the stairs to his office and hanging it on the wall.
It cost so much, there is no way he’s leaving it chained in the bike shed. Bikes mysteriously disappear. Especially items of beauty like the Boardi.
