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