It had been inching up his body as he slept.

By the time he awoke, the breeze was up to his neck. The warm air brought in the last shades of green hidden in the moor-grass outside, and a voice that edged around his consciousness in staccato whispers.

Samuel.

I'll find you.

The words woke him almost every morning, breaking through from dream to reality.

"Who are you?" He'd whisper into the ether, careful that no one heard him.

He couldn't pinpoint exactly when it started. Occupying a space between two worlds brought a thick fog down upon him. He had memories of a time when things were normal, but he had no idea if they belonged to him. They'd once lived in the city, he knew that for certain. Cheek by jowl with people and ideas and complicated things. Then, like everyone else, they'd moved to the countryside at some muddy point in time. Books were hidden. Jewellery buried. Toys abandoned.

It was a fresh start. He'd come to hate that phrase. No one ever had a fresh start because of something good he thought, though even he could appreciate their trade-off sometimes, when he was searching for silver linings. A simple life was a hard life. An easy life was complicated.

In the countryside his mother became a country woman and his father became a country man. Harsher with words, more protective and expecting of them. His ray of light was his little sister Emmaline. He lived for her, and everything was lighter with her around. He knew most kids his age would probably find this circumstance annoying, but he loved her. She was nearly four, and so charming that he was jealous sometimes, although he figured that was alright. What he found strange was that he couldn't really remember her coming along. In his head she just appeared one day and that was that.

She was the only one he could talk to.

His parents worked dawn 'til dusk, as would be expected of him the day he turned fourteen in nearly a year's time. They strapped carts to horses, herded cattle into pens, pinned chickens on woodblocks. When the fields captured his parents in those long hours, and when he was free from the shadow of the schoolmaster's stick - and Mr. Hoffen was no schoolmaster, he knew that - he chose to dream.

When they were different people, his father had been a printer, his mother a translator. He would never say it, but he wondered if that's why they had to work so long, because the countryside was a penance, not an opportunity. His father's face did nothing to betray his feelings about that. He was an eternal optimist, and so the end of each bad year would bring promises that the next would be better. That autumn though, the late October sun brought shadow to his father's face. Winter would be hard, and they would be hardened in the face of it. As the last trace of the sun was extinguished from the last day of the month, it cast a pall over the smallholding. His family and others joined in their gloom.

That night, he took to bed under a spell of insomnia. He was still awake, sheets crumpled and kicked aside, when rain cut through the gaps in the crumbling wooden window. Big fat droplets. Outside, the moor-grass rejoiced and danced under its pressure, and whoops and shouts floated on the wind. He held a beaker through the frame and tasted the water, imagining himself taking part in some great ceremony. It tasted like life and cast away his wakefulness, but as he was back in bed and drifting off, the voice started again.

I'll find you, Samuel.

I Love you.

It always frightened him, but by now there was a comforting familiarity to it, and he fell asleep in its motion, only to wake in the middle of the night cold and alone. He fell into bad habits, cursing himself as he did so, and ran to the other bedroom to jump in with Emmaline and his mother. His father was out watching the pregnant cows. He'd been praying for salvation of some kind. Now celebrating deliverance. Samuel was on the outside of the small bed, but his mother stretched her arm over in her sleep and nestled him in with them. He felt safe feeling her fingers digging into the fat of his belly. As he was falling back into sleep, he thought he heard the voice again, only to realise it was Emmaline.

"What?" he said, trying not to wake his mother.

Emmaline put her mouth against his ear until he could feel her hot breath, amplifying the cocoon-like claustrophobia under his mother's arm.

"I have to tell you something."

He waited, squeezing her leg in encouragement.

"That's not mama," she whispered, falling almost instantly back into a rhythm of light snoring.