The Other Child by Charlotte Link

contain the chaos. It was an expectation he could not live up to, but perhaps he had never lived up to expectations, and that might be the real problem with his life.
    Chad Becket was eighty-three years old.
    He was unlikely to change now.
    It was five o’clock Sunday morning, but that was not an unusual time for Chad to get up. When it had still been a working farm, his father had often got the whole family out of bed at four, and Chad was no longer able to change the rhythm by which his whole life had run. Nor did he want to. He liked the hours before daybreak, when the world was quiet and sleepy and seemed to belong to him alone. He had often used the time to wander down to the beach in the half-light, sometimes in the thick fog that pressed inland from the sea. On those days he had been forced to go down the steep cliff almost blind, but it had never been a problem. He knew every stone, every branch. He had always felt safe.
    Now he could no longer risk it. For the last three years his bad hip had made every step painful. He still refused to go to the doctor – he was not against doctors per se, he just did not believe that anyone could help him with it. At least, not without an operation, and the thought of hospital filled him with dread. He had a feeling that if he ended up in one, he would never return to his farm, and as he had the firm intention of dying in his bed, he was not going to leave his own patch of land now, not on the final stretch.
    He preferred to grit his teeth.
    The day was going to be sunny and bright again. That meant that his hip would not play up too much. The wet days were bad, when the clammy cold crept into his bones. The house was hard to heat and the rooms were always damp in the winter. His mother used to heat bricks for hours in the range in the kitchen, before putting them in the beds in the evening. At least that way you could warm up, seeing as the sheets were normally damp too. But his mother had been dead for ages, and Gwen had never known that trick. He himself thought, as did so many others too, that for his pleasure alone it was not worth reviving the habit. He found the damp linen unpleasant in the evening, but you would fall asleep in the end, and then you did not notice any more.
    He listened carefully. Everyone seemed to be sleeping. Not a sound came from Gwen’s room, nor any sign of life from the Brankleys or their dogs. Just as well. After a night like last night they would only get on his nerves.
    He shuffled into the kitchen to make himself a coffee but did a double take when he saw the mess in the room. As Jennifer had been taking care of Gwen all evening and then later gone out with her dogs, it must have been Colin who had cleared the table. He had obviously seen his job as done once he had put the dishes, glasses and food in the kitchen. The crockery was piled high on the table, sideboards and in the sink. No one had covered the leftover soup, the roast or the vegetables stuck to the pans. It did not smell good.
    Chad decided to do without a coffee for now.
    He slowly moved over into the little room beside the living room, which served as a kind of study. Not that the farm required an actual functioning study or office, but they had the computer here. In spite of Chad’s refusal to move with the times, it had found its way into the house in the end at Gwen’s insistence. Files from years past, when the Beckett farm had still made modest profits, lined the wooden shelves along the walls. A few catalogues lay on the desk. Fashion, as Chad saw it, the stuff that Gwen ordered now and again. He lowered himself with a groan into the office chair and booted up the computer.
    Unbelievable that he had learnt to use the thing! He had fought against it for long enough, but in the end Fiona had convinced him to set up an email address. In fact, she had set one up for him, and a password. ‘Gwen often uses the computer. She doesn’t have to read your mail,