“I’ve had a few already,” Emma said, rubbing her stomach as if to
20
indicate that she was already far too full. “And there’s still the turkey 21
to come.”
22
We locked eyes and several conversations passed unsaid between us.
23
You’re not eating.
24
I am.
25
You’re lying.
26
I’m not.
27
Don’t lie to me.
28
How dare you accuse me of lying?
29
Or:
30
You’re not eating.
31S
I’m not hungry.
32N
You must be hungry. Eat something.
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Stop telling me what to do.
01
Or:
02
You look terrible.
03
Well, fuck you.
04
I’m serious. When did you last eat?
05
It’s none of your business.
06
None of it needed saying.
07
“Don’t,” she said instead.
08
I nodded. “Can I do anything?” I asked.
09
“No,” she replied. “How was Mum?”
10
“She was okay,” I said. “Tired, but much better.”
11
“Was she cross? With me. For not coming?”
12
I wanted to say that she had been cross, that she’d felt let down,
13
abandoned even, so that I could be the better daughter. And I wanted
14
to say that she hadn’t noticed, so that Emma could be the forgotten one,
15
relegated to the pits of dementia. But they both would have been stupid
16
lies, because together we knew that I was never the best- loved, most
17
memorable daughter.
18
“No,” I said. “She was fine.”
19
Emma nodded, relieved. “Well, that’s something, I suppose. I’m
20
sorry. For not coming. I just . . . I couldn’t.”
21
“Let’s talk about something else,” I said, and I wondered if other
22
families had so many lines drawn in the sand, so many words that
23
couldn’t be spoken. “Is that one of her jumpers?” I asked.
24
“Yes!” Emma grinned. “Do you remember it? It always makes me
25
think of that Christmas when Dad dressed up as Santa Claus on Christ-
26
mas Eve to sneak into our rooms and then fell over the toy chest and
27
made such a fucking racket that he woke us both up and we all ended
28
up in accident and emergency.”
29
“I remember,” I replied.
30
“We were in our pajamas and Mum was in this jumper and the rest
S31
of the waiting room was drunk and merry and injured too. Do you
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remember? And that man who’d sliced his hand open on a tape dis-
02
penser?”
03
“And the nurse who gave us sweets at midnight.”
04
“She had pink hair.”
05
“Yes!”
06
“I always planned to have pink hair after that.”
07
“Do it, then,” I said.
08
“Maybe I will,” Emma replied.
09
“It’s okay,” said Marnie, stepping back into the conversation. “I do
10
know him after all. He works in the post room at Charles’s office, and,
11
anyway, crisis averted. Let me check these turkeys. I thought you were
12
going to take some photos?”
13
There was sadness that day. It emanated from the two framed pho-
14
tographs on the mantelpiece, side by side, snapshots from their honey-
15
moon. It was there in the wooden bauble hanging from the tree and
16
engraved with Our First Married Christmas. I suppose they must have 17
received it as a wedding present. How was anyone to know then that
18
the marriage wouldn’t last the year? There was sadness in the ghosts
19
that sat beside us all: beside Marnie and me and beside the other
20
guests— drifters and strays— all of whom brought their lost loved ones
21
with them, too.
22
But there was joy that day as well. And plenty of it. So I did as in-
23
structed and ignored all the things that couldn’t be addressed and fo-
24
cused instead on the food and the conversation and the games that we
25
played in the late afternoon, all manner of strangers shouting out an-
26
swers and high- fiving our teammates. I won at charades, if it’s possible 27
to win. And I lost at Scrabble. Ian placed three eight- letter words and 28
scored well over five hundred points. Emma and I beat Jenna and Isobel
29
at canasta.
30
By seven o’clock most of the guests had left, and Marnie had aban-
31S
doned her apron and was sitting on the sofa, her arm draped over her
32N
small bump.
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“Shall I— ”
01
“Just a quick one?” said Marnie.
02
Our friendship had been built on “just a quick tidy- ups.” In our first
03
year at secondary school— the first year of our friendship— our teacher 04
Mrs. Carlisle was fanatical about neatness and cleanliness. With hind-
05
sight, it’s clear that she suffered from fairly extreme obsessive- compulsive 06
disorder. At the time, we thought she was simply a neat freak, but, as
07
always, the truth is never evident in the moment.
08
Most mornings— sometimes more than once— she would insist that
09
the entire class engage in “just a quick tidy- up.” This meant hanging
10
coats and jumpers on the pegs at the back of the room, squaring ruck-
11
sacks beneath our seats, textbooks in desks, ponytails retied if loose, no 12
hair ties on wrists, no squiffy collars, no laces undone, no rolled shirt-13
sleeves, and an endless list of small demands.
14
We always complied but it became a stock phrase, a joke that de-
15
fined our friendship, one of the first things we shared that others— our
16
parents, our siblings, other students in different tutor groups, and those 17
at other schools— failed to understand at all.
18
Marnie and Emma watched two festive films— back to back— as
19
comfortable together as they had been when we were children, while I
20
flitted around the flat, stacking the dishwasher, clearing plates and
21
glasses and wiping down the counters, until order was restored and I
22
could settle beneath their blanket, too. I remember that the flat felt
23
loud despite the silence. There was the whir of the dishwasher and a
24
dripping somewhere within the walls. It ran along the skirting board
25
and up the stairs and I turned up the volume on the television to drown
26
it all out.
27
As the opening sequence of the third film illuminated the walls of
28
the room, I felt my phone vibrating against my thigh. I pulled it out—
29
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I think I wondered if it might be
30
an unexpected message from my father— and found instead an email
S31
from Valerie Sands.
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The subject line read PLEASE READ: DON’T DELETE.
02
I felt suspicious, but intrigued, too. We hadn’t heard anything from
03
Valerie: not a word since she’d published the second of her two articles.
04
My initial anxiety had diminished in the intervening period. I had taken
05
her silence and assumed that she was finished. And yet, here she was, on
06
the evening of the most intimate day of the year, a day for family and
07
friends, for home and for happiness, sending an email to someone she
08
barely knew.
09
I’d stopped following her online as regularly, only occasionally trac-
10
ing her footsteps and mentally mapping her days. I had seen that she’d
11
attended but not performed in a show organized by the dance studio
12
where she now had lessons at least twice each week. And that she’d
13
written a few festive pieces for the newspaper: when the pop- up ice
14
rink flooded, when the high street Christmas lights were switched on
15
by an entirely forgettable celebrity, and something rather profound
16
about homelessness and loneliness. But I wasn’t tracking her route
17
through the city each day or researching every tagged location any-
18
more. But it seemed that despite my indolence she’d remained just as
19
committed to us.
20
I opened the email, hiding the brightness of the screen beneath the
21
blanket. She said that she knew that her first story wasn’t entirely ac-
22
curate, that as soon as she met Marnie, it became painfully apparent
23
and very quickly, too, that she’d misinterpreted her suspicions. She said 24
that she wouldn’t make the same mistake again and wished me a merry
25
Christmas. “But”— she said— “I don’t think your story, your version of
26
events, is entirely accurate, either.” She said that her jigsaw had missing 27
pieces, certainly, but that she’d uncovered enough of them to know
28
that there was more here, more hidden, more that still needed saying.
29
She encouraged me to respond, to fill in the blanks, to finally tell my
30
truth. Because, she said, and she promised this, she would find the an-
31S
swers eventually.
32N
I deleted the email and squeezed my phone into the gap between
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two sofa cushions. I was feeling it again, the burgeoning fear, a panic
01
reigniting within me.
02
But then Marnie jolted, the blanket slipping from her shoulders and
03
her hand darting toward her stomach. “I just felt something,” she said.
04
“I think I felt something.”
05
“Felt what?” said Emma. “What did you feel?”
06
“I don’t know. The baby? Like a butterfly. Like a butterfly in my
07
stomach.”
08
“Let me,” said Emma, shifting Marnie’s hand away and folding hers
09
into that space. “I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything.”
10
“Well, it’s stopped now.”
11
“Oh,” said Emma, disappointed, withdrawing her hand. “Well, let
12
me know quicker next time,” she said. “So that I can feel it too.”
13
I would watch over the next few months as that bump grew and
14
grew, swelling and stretching underneath Marnie’s skin, until it sat in
15
front of her like a ball tucked beneath her shirt. I saw her changing in
16
the flicker of a flip book, inch by inch, week by week, as we fell back
17
into our old routine, dinners at the end of each week. It was sort of
18
beautiful and definitely strange to watch this woman— who I’d first
19
known as a girl— evolving into a mother. At every stage of that evolu-
20
tion, I had protected her. At first, it was from her parents, and then
21
from her boyfriends, and then from her boss. And later from a con-
22
temptible husband.
23
And always, even now, from the truth.
24
25
26
Emma and I stayed over that night. We shared a bed and I felt like we 27
were children tucked into a coastal caravan all over again. Over break-
28
fast, Emma asked about Valerie, and Marnie explained that they’d met
29
just that once and that she had inadvertently prompted the second ar-
30
ticle, that it had been all her fault, and that I’d been right: we’d simply S31
needed to be patient. I excused myself under the pretense of going to
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strip the bed because I couldn’t navigate that conversation with a hang-
02
over. And then, as we left, Emma looked down at the rug at the foot of
03
the stair
s and she said, “Oh, look. This is where she left your husband
04
to die,” and she rolled her eyes. Her humor was uncomfortably dark,
05
wicked, and uninhibited, but Marnie laughed, liberated by the blunt-
06
ness. And I tried to smile, too, to be part of the joke.
07
But I knew then that it might still fall apart, that the truth might
08
still find me. It was close, always nearby, never fully in the past.
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31S
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01
02
03
04
Chapter Twenty- Eight
05
k
06
07
08
09
10
T
11
he mornings were dark and the evenings were dark and the
12
nights were darker still. It was cold enough for snow with the
13
sky set in dirty white. The trees were bare, just twigs, threatening to
14
snap, and the air was crisp and biting. My skin was so dry that it itched 15
constantly, flaking into my bedding and towels and there in my clothes
16
when I undressed at the end of each day.
17
I had been working long hours since the beginning of the month,
18
covering the holidays, the parents who couldn’t come back until the
19
middle of January, when their children returned to school. And the
20
most senior members of staff, who wouldn’t be back until the end of
21
the month, because the beginning of the year was the perfect time for
22
the Caribbean and much of East Asia.
23
Every morning when I arrived at my desk, I reread Valerie’s email
24
and I tried to concoct a reply in my mind. I played with the words, pre-
25
paring a polite version that encouraged her to please step back and find
26
another story, and a vicious, angry one that challenged her, and, some-
27
times, in only the quietest whisper, one that confessed. But then the
28
workday would begin, and I would deliberately distract myself with
29
issues that were easier to fix.
30
It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I had this sense that she was watch-
S31
ing me. I sometimes saw her, or at least I thought I did: outside my flat; N32
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