The Rosary Garden

by that omission she had chosen to save her aunt. She needed to save someone.
‘There’s a kind of wheel on the side of your chair there,’ Swan was saying. ‘If you turn it, the seat will tilt back and you can get a bit of a rest maybe – rest your head anyway. Three hours and we’ll be home. Your mother will be glad to see you.’
Ali tipped back her seat, removing herself from Swan’s eyeline. She watched the reflection of overhead branches slide down the windscreen. She would be glad to see her mother but was dreading the house, knowing what Davy had done there. She would go up to her room as soon as she could, lock the door and climb under the covers.
And in the middle of the night, when everything was still, she would get up and go downstairs to the garden and dig a hole between the roots of their apple tree. The place where she and Davy drank and laughed, and perhaps kissed in the warm July nights.
She would bury the doll there, bury it all.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to especially thank the Scottish Book Trust and their New Writer Award scheme, for providing the cash, encouragement and mentoring that helped develop the first draft of The Rosary Garden some years ago. Thanks also to the Dundee International Book Prize and the staff of the sadly defunct Cargo Books, who first published and supported it. To my editor Miranda Jewess and all the Viper team, endless thanks for your commitment, fine minds and good cheer. Lastly, gratitude and respect to the best of agents, Jenny Brown.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicola White is a writer, former curator and documentary maker. She won the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2008, and in 2012 was Leverhulme Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University. The Rosary Garden won the Dundee International Book Prize, was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize and was selected as one of the four best crime debuts of the year at Harrogate Festival. She grew up in Dublin and New York, and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. Find her on Twitter @whiteheadednic.