Read The Overnight for Free Online Page B

Find someone to go away with for a couple of weeks if you won't on your own, or failing that, a few sessions on a sunned."
    "Yes, dad," Agnes says rather than revive the disagreement. Her parents took her around half the world when she was little, but now they're too frail to travel, and she would only worry if she left them alone together for any length of time. Making herself look as though she has been away appeals to her even less—it would be like suggesting slyly that she wants to go. "Anyway," she says, "you remember we aren't supposed to get personal calls at work."
    "I thought it was calls from friends that are prohibited. I didn't realise it applied to family as well."
    "I hope we'll always be both, but is it something urgent?"
    "There was a crash on the motorway near you just now on the news. How are the conditions there?"
    Agnes turns from crouching secretively over the phone and glances down her aisles towards the window. Fog that has blotted out the supermarket swells the brake lights of a mammoth lorry as it lumbers out of the retail park. "It's a bit murky," she admits.
    "I can't hear you, Annie. You know our ears aren't what they were."
    "I said there's a bit of fog, Dad. I'll take extra care on the way home. I know that's what you want."
    "I wouldn't have thought it was much."
    She hears the hurt just under the thin skin of his voice—the loneliness he and her mother will never admit to feeling as their old friends grow too old to visit them, those friends who aren't older than alive. "Of course it isn't," she assures him. "You and mummy look after each other till I'm home."
    "We can for longer than that, Annie."
    This could be the start of another of their family disagreements that take hours to reach no conclusion, because they're all so anxious not to injure one another that they have to pick their way through every detail. She's desperate to terminate the conversation without giving him an excuse to feel slighted, because she can hear Woody's voice nearby. She peers at the computer terminal next to the phone and types in the search box the first words that come to her: Fenny Meadows. "Well, you don't need to," she's saying meanwhile. "You know I'll always come home."
    "Poor girl, except you aren't one any longer, unless we've kept you that way."
    "I' ll always be yours." Agnes feels as if she's struggling to drag herself free of a slough of emotion that has grown stagnant. "I really must do some work," she says. "Kiss mummy for me."
    "We might get up to more than that," he says, which he ought to know makes her uncomfortable. At least it shows there's some life in her parents, and she's able to replace the receiver. The computer screen has turned blank, and here comes a reflection to see why. When she spins around guiltily, however, nobody is approaching. She didn't see a blurred figure rising through the greyness after all. In a moment Woody does arrive, but from her right. "Problem, ah, Anyes?"
    "It's gone."
    "Try switching it off and on again."
    She pokes the button on the block of the computer, and darkness wells into the screen. As she waits for a few seconds, Woody says "What were you trying to find?"
    "Just the, the history of this area."
    She presses the button a second time and feels his scrutiny gathering on her. She's telling herself that it can't be apparent she was talking to her father when Woody says "It's for whoever called just now, right?"
    "Right. That's to say that's right, I mean, yes."
    "I don't see where you took their number to call them back."
    "They've, oh, they said they were going out. They'll ring in a bit, they said."
    "Always get a number." At last he transfers his gaze to the screen, which has turned blue while the computer checks for errors. "When you're through here, can you give Madeleine a hand with the quiz?" he says, and frowns towards the counter. "Keep an eye out for lines, what you Brits call queues."
    There are more than a dozen customers at large in the shop,